The Watch Tower

This is the best novel I've read in I don't know how long. Written in the '60s about Australia in the '40s and recently republished, it's about two sisters who live first with their mother and then a husband—both horrible, horrible people—in almost bewildering isolation in the middle of Australia's largest metropolis. The book's real marvel is the way it makes you see and believe how two bright, ambitious women can burrow themselves into—and, in part, out of—a life of darkness and disconnection. I know little about Harrower, but by the evidence of The Watch Tower she's an equal of Muriel Spark and Ian McEwan.