The Leper's Companions

Description

'An enchanting book that provides a vivid sense of life at a time when our forebears co-existed closely with hunger, dreams, lice, angels, contagion, foul odours, mermaids and miracles' - Barbara Trapido, Express To escape from her own sadness, a woman finds refuge in a past time. In a village by the sea she watches the lives of the inhabitants unfold around her. But the year is now 1410 and this is a world of devils and miracles, a world in which there are no clear boundaries between reality and the power of the imagination. A man's discovery of a mermaid washed up on the sand starts a chain of events that leads three of the villagers to accompany the enigmatic figure of the leper on a pilgrimmage to the Holy Land. The woman joins them and sets out without the certainty of ever coming home again. The Leper's Companions was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Julia Blackburn has written five books of non-fiction - Charles Waterton, The Emperor's Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya and The Three of Us, which won the 2009 J. R. Ackerley Award. She has also written an autobiography, Twin Paths and With Billie - a family memoir; and two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the author of seventeen short stories specially commisioned by BBC Radio, a selection of which were published in My Animals and Other Family, and four radio plays, including The Spellbound Horses.

As beautifully written and as profoundly researched as all Julia Blackburn's work * Spectator * A remarkable evocation of another time and another frame of reference * Daily Telegraph * Julia Blackburn has an extraordinary talent for thinking herlsef into other worlds... Reading her book, you experience the uncanny sensation that you have somehow always known these places * Evening Standard * She wears her talents like a modern Renaissance woman with elegance and affable ease * The Times *