Dreaming the Karoo

Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers... Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity and power. Again and again, as I read, I gasped at the intense relevance and importance, as well as the beauty of this book.

Hugh Brody, author of THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN

An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction.

Olivia Laing, author of EVERYBODY

A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution.

William Atkins, author of EXILES

A fascinating, poetic response to our contemporary age.

Joanna Kavenna, Literary Review

Parallels [with the present] bring complexity and immediacy to the book... Blackburn powerfully evokes the Karoo... Her observations of her fellow travellers are insightful.

Barnaby Phillips, Times Literary Supplement

[Blackburn's] wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a drily downbeat humour and a genius for serendipity... Blackburn doesn't give us answers. Instead she works a miracle. In this book dead people talk in a dead language, describing a culture and way of life which is also dead, and yet, thanks to...Blackburn's tactful, beautifully-framed extrapolations, those dead come before us and speak.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

[Blackburn's] writing of history and memory - both personal and public - is so deft as to seem effortless. This elliptical and bewitching book is a delight.

Spectator

Dreaming the Karoo is at once a mesmerising meandering into the near-extinct language and sensibility of the /Xam, and a diary of that intangible sense of loss and loneliness that so many of us felt during lockdown.

Tablet

It is such a wonderful book. It made me stretch my hand to my lover. It made me want to show my children the footprints, scars and stones under our feet. It made me want to sit down to look at the sea... It made me deeply grateful that I am alive.

Max Porter (Praise for Time Song)

Both Wordsworthian and Woolfian ... This book is a wonder.

Adam Nicolson (Praise for Time Song)

Breathtaking... [a] splendidly rich book... I admire the intelligence, the appetite for discovery and the shining imagination that have gone into it.

Gillian Tindall (Praise for Time Song)

This book gripped me by its clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past and Julia Blackburn's extraordinary sympathy and perspicacity in finding in the lightest and smallest traces the story of our human species

Antony Gormley (Praise for Time Song)

Poetic and fascinating

Olivia Laing (Praise for Time Song)