The Towers of Trebizond

(Paperback)

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"'Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return to High Mass.' Thus starts, with one of the most famous opening lines in modern English literature, Rose Macaulay's classic novel, The Towers of Trebizond.
As wise, civilised and wholly entertaining as it was when first published in 1956, the novel tells the beautifully absurd story of the imimitable Aunt Dot, her niece Laurie and Father Chantry-Pigg and of their expedition together to Turkey to explore the possibility of establishing a High Anglican mission there. Each member of the party has an additional extra-curricular motivation for making the trip: Father Chantry-Pigg wishes to meet the fanatics in residence at the top of Mount Ararat; Aunt Dot is set on the emancipation of Turkish women through wider use of the bathing hat; Laurie's object is
pure pleasure

Reviews

'Rose Macaulay is so artful, so witty, so responsive. The Towers of Trebizond is a book which will irradiate not only the wet afternoons of a summer holiday, but memory as well.'
The Times

'Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond is
an utter delight, the most brilliantly witty and captivatingly charming book I have read. Fantasy, farce, high comedy, delicious japes at many aspects of the frenzied modern world and a succession of illuminating thoughts about love, sex, life, churches and religion are all tossed together with enchanting results. Humane and shrewd, Rose Macaulay's is an engaging and idiosyncratic talent.'
New York Times

Author Bio

Rose Macaulay was born into an intellectual family in 1881 in Rugby. When she was six, the family moved to a small coastal village in Italy, where her father made a living as a translator of classical works and editor of textbooks. There, she developed a sense of adventure that was to be a dominant feature of her life. Macaulay returned to Britain to be educated at Oxford, and after graduating went to London to write. She soon became one of the most popular novelists of her day and a key figure in the 1920s literary scene swimming with Rupert Brooke, attending the farewell party for Isherwood and Auden on the eve of their departure for the Spanish Civil War, trying to teach E.M. Forster to use crutches, celebrating Christmas with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson at Sissinghurst. Macaulays literary output was prolific and diverse; she was the author of some thirty-nine books, mainly novels and comedies, but also poetry, essays on literature, religion and travel writing, including the excellent The Pleasure of Ruins, a book combining travel, archaeology and autobiography. Among her many celebrated novels of the 1920s and 1930s are Told By An Idiot, Crewe Train, The World My Wilderness and They Were Defeated. Her career culminated in her masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond, which she referred to as my own story. Here she managed to bring together innumerable threads of her talent, producing a novel at once funny and sad, lighthearted and deeply felt, flippant and profound. Rose Macaulay never married. She was created Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958, the year of her death.