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  • Published: 31 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448161782
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

The Emperor's Last Island

A Journey to St Helena




'A magically idiosyncratic collage of history, biography and travel writing, permeated with madness and fantasy, absurdity and despair... Bewitching' - The Times

The Emperor's Last Stand is a book about St Helena, an island with a sad, strange history, and about the tangle of stories and myths, absurdities and simple facts that have accumulated around Napoleon and his sojourn here. It follows him through the eyes of those who lived with him, who guarded him, who managed only to catch a brief glimpse of him, alive or dead.

It is also a personal account: a description of Julia Blackburn's own journey to St Helena and at the same time a journey through the private memories and associations evoked by the telling of this poignant and curious story.

  • Published: 31 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448161782
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Julia Blackburn

Julia Blackburn has written a number of books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry. Time Song was shortlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize, Threads won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award and the New Angle Prize, Thin Paths was shortlisted for the Costa Prize for Biography, and The Three of Us won the J.R. Ackerley Award. Her two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper’s Companions, were both shortlisted for the Women's Prize. She lives in Suffolk and Italy.

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Praise for The Emperor's Last Island

A melancholy and exquisitely bizarre essay on fame, morality and the vanity of human wishes

London Review of Books

Moving and original... Julia Blackburn writes like an angel

Mary Wesley

Pure enchantment, stranger than fiction

Cosmopolitan