Here I am, 76 years old, grandson of the late Bertram L. Baker, the political pioneer who in 1948 became the very first Black person elected to office in the history of Brooklyn. Many tens of thousands of Blacks had lived in Brooklyn through the 1800s and into the first half of the 20th century. But it was this immigrant, born on the then British colony of Nevis in 1898, who made Brooklyn history, as the Black political pioneer.
The Tower is a matryoshka doll of a book, which starts with this papery outer layer and, by way of Katherine Mansfield, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, illness, girlhood and more, peels back these different skins to reach the real, inner story: that of the author, denoted here as simply T. The former Times Literary Supplement editor's follow-up to Dandelions - a hybrid of family memoir and cultural history spun out around the central thread of Lenarduzzi's grandmother - also flexes the parameters of fact and fiction.