What’s the best book to take camping?

A waterproof one … as it turns out.

Overnight, thanks to the worst floods and tornados to batter the east coast of Australia in 30 years, my ancient two-man tent turns into a leaky ark.

I wake mid-storm in frenzy. Where’s my book? Is it dry?

My hands scrabble in the blackness and I finally find it. It seems, so far, to have missed the worst of the slop and sits, snug-as-a-bug, in its two nylon bags.

Phew.

I hug my precious cargo to my chest and start drifting, feeling a little bit like Piscine Molitor (Pi) in Life of Pi.

As the waves roil and swirl I imagine how, if the waters rise as high as my midriff, the shock of the wetness will wake me, alerting me to danger before any real damage (textually) can be done.

I dream, too, of the scene where Pi’s written record of his days flies off, page after page, into gale-force winds.

I spend the next few hours fitfully waking and sleeping — “watching over” my  book (The Watch Tower) — until first light when I can determine my vigil’s success.

There’s just one kink where a rogue droplet penetrated its smooth pages and swelled them to an ant-sized crest.

I spend an anxious ten minutes ironing this bump out with persistent finger-strokes and I’m elated when the book finally sits flat.

As I’m boiling the camp kettle, I watch all the Glampers flipping “pages” on their Kindles and iPads and feel miffed because, surely, of all human activities, camping should remain low-tech.

One of my relatives, who’d tucked his brick-sized fantasy novel into a nook in his camper’s kitchen before going to bed last night, discovers the deluge has forced its way in. The book’s waterlogged and has bloomed into a concertina file — but he’s not worried. It’s a cheap paperback — no leather-clad collector’s item — so easily replaced.

My Elizabeth Harrower, however, has been difficult to come by, involving footslog and uber-Google sessions by two people over several weeks.

There are a few reasons The Watch Tower’s been so hard to find; become so needle-in-a-haystack scarce.

A primary one is that Harrower’s writing is so damn impressive. The story she tells of two sisters caught in a nightmarish life with an obsessive and unpredictable man is compelling and terrifying to say the least.

First published in 1966, The Watch Tower was recently reissued as a Text Classic. It has since garnered a great deal of acclaim, appearing on many Top Books of 2012 lists.

In her introduction to the book, Joan London says The Watch Tower is about “Entrapment, and finding a way out. Or not.”

She writes: “Something runs clear and strong through this wonderful, painful novel, the dark and the light. The victim and the survivor. Suffering and joy. The knowledge of both. Reality.”

Reality.

A late night campsite conversation brings up memories of realities I’d rather had stayed buried.

Reality.

The hanging tent-light’s on the blink so I’ve had to quickly master the art of holding a torch beneath my chin and tilting it up and down to illuminate The Watch Tower’s pages.

Reality.

My ark may be leaky and, after two days of torrents, resemble a swampy prison. And yet …

Reality.

The glow of the torchlight and the pull of the narrative are making it seem less claustrophobic. More like an adventure.

More like I’m a sodden castaway (without a tiger). Adrift in my floating home.