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The Leper's Companions
  • Published: 31 October 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448190904
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

The Leper's Companions

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 May 2000
EBook
31 Oct 2013
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'An enchanting book that provides a vivid sense of life at a time when our forebears co-existed closely with hunger, dreams, lice, angels, contagion, foul odours, mermaids and miracles' - Barbara Trapido, Express

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.
  • Published: 31 October 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448190904
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

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.
JB

Also by Julia Blackburn

The Book Of Colour
Threads
Thin Paths
Dreaming the Karoo
Time Song
The Need For Nonsense
The Three of Us
See all

Praise for The Leper's Companions

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