The Leper's Companions - Softcover

Blackburn, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099272768 ISBN 13: 9780099272762

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

In this quiet allegory of love, loss and the healing powers of imagination, an unnamed narrator loses someone she loves--"It does not matter who that person was or what sort of love it had been"--and needs time to recover. She yearns to travel to a foreign country but can't. Yet her need for escape is such that, during a restless evening walk to a local village, she finds herself whisked back in time to the early 1400s.

Through her, we're drawn into the villagers' lives, loves and deaths: the woman who sees devils; Sally, aged 14, pregnant and married to the man who finds the beached mermaid; the shoemaker and his wife, whose passion sparks the moment they meet, and endures beyond death; the priest and the leper.

Following a series of events that seem extraordinary to the modern eye, but unexceptional to the villagers--miraculous cures, a monstrous birth, the mermaid's brief appearance-- a small party sets out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Julia Blackburn--whose previous novel The Book of Colour was shortlisted for the Orange Prize--weaves her intricate four-dimensional tapestry from the simplest of threads. Her lucid and absorbing tale highlights both the otherness and the warm familiarity of the past, and unfolds the processes of grief and recuperation to show how life can grow out of loss. --Lisa Gee

Review:

"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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099272768
• ISBN 13: 9780099272762
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224