The Leper's Companions - Hardcover

Blackburn, Julia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022405127X ISBN 13: 9780224051279

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

One morning in 1410, two men from an East-Coast fishing village find a mermaid washed up on the sand. This discovery starts a chain of events that leads four of our villages-the priest, the shoemaker's wife, the fisherman's daughter and the leper-on a pilgrimage: across the North Sea, to Venice and then along the Mediterranean coast to the Holy Land. With the magical imagination that has illumiated her previous books, Julia Blackburn travels with her pilgrims. At first she follows from Distance, but gradually she pulls closer until the five centuries between their time and ours dissolve and the author has entered their world. A spellbinding novel by one of the most original writers currently at work, The Leper's Companions is an extraordinary evocation of the medieval world-a book about birth and death, about destiny, about the courage to let go without the certainty of surviving, to journey with no certainty of return.

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:

"This slim book possesses a remarkable intensity.... [A] hypnotic vision of the worlds horror and beauty, banality and sacredness--and of the frailty and splendor of the human mind."--The New York Times Book Review

"Profound...dreamy.... Blackburn [has] made something deep and poetic."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"In the end, there is a sense not merely of satisfaction, but almost of exhilaration."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 022405127X
• ISBN 13: 9780224051279
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224