Daisy Bates in the Desert

Description

'This is the story of a remarkable individual life, a story rendered the more peculiar and fascinating by Blackburn's graceful prose and ever-surprising vision' - The Times In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years.In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Ms Bates says she was most happy. She fuses her own imagination and experience with that of Daisy Bates, unitl she seems to be recalling this other life as it it were her own.

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 With Billie - a family memoir, The Three of Us, which won the 2009 J. R. Ackerley Award, 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.

She has extended the boundaries of biography with an exhilarating exercise in imaginative power and a brilliant piece of writing -- Anne Chisholm * Observer * The book is full of vivid, astonishing images -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * The Times * Brilliant... enchanting -- Jan Morris * Independent *