The Ebony Tower, which comprises a novella, three stories, and a translation of a medieval French tale, echoes themes from Fowles’s widely praised and bestselling novels as it probes the fitful relations between love and hate, pleasure and pain, fantasy and reality.

          "The Ebony Tower" is a series of novellas, rich in imagery, exploring the nature of art. The story of the title – which the "Observer" described as 'the finest thing Fowles has written’ – concerns a journalist visiting a celebrated but reclusive painter. He is intrigued by the complicated erotic relationship between the elderly painter and the beautiful young women who share their lives with him.