- Hardcover: 197 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon Books; First Edition, First Impression edition (April 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679439846
- ISBN-13: 978-0679439844
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 12.7 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,411,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk 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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
Julia Blackburn is the author of THE EMPEROR'S LAST ISLAND, DAISY BATES IN THE DESERT (shortlisted for the Waterstones/Esquire Award) and THE BOOK OF COLOUR. She has two children and lives in Suffolk
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a beautiful written book about a women who has her own way of dealing with sorrow. The death of someone she loved dearly, makes her escape "the real world", and suddonly she finds herself in her own town, but this time the year is 1410. Not only is it a good story, but it's wonderfully written, so good that you almost feel that you are there with the main character in the book. It's a pretty short book (about 150 pages,ca.), so I bet just about anyone can find time to read it, and everyone should too!
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I really liked Julia Blackburn's little book. It is exquisitely written in lean & learned detail, & carries the Reader off into another time & another place where our ancestors tried to make sense of what they saw, believed & felt.
This is a rare book to encounter about what it might have been like to live 800 years ago on the coast of a sparsely-settled land, where a new religion interfaces with the old, where life is so fragile before the onslaught of the weather, relationships are infused with hallucinations, & pilgrimages to the Holy Land undertaken in dire poverty & total surrender.
THE LEPER'S COMPANIONS is about a grieving woman & her travel through that hurt into healing.
A pearl of a parable that glows with authenticity, & I hope it comes into reprint so that it can thrill others as it did me. Until then go hunt up a used copy, I'm not selling mine!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
12 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Great book, thought provoking and intelligently written
28 May 1999
Format:Hardcover
Julia Blackburn's new novel The Leper' Companions is a work of careful thought and hidden meaning. A woman who has suffered a recent loss creates for herself an imaginary, dreamlike world with roots in the 1400s. Throughout most of the book, the author is tangently present in this made-up world and only occassionaly are we reminded that this story is going on only in her mind. I recommend the book based on it's interesting character development. Many would say the end is somewhat anti-climatic, but I believe the author left it so intentionally. All in all a good afternoon's read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Coping with Grief
26 Oct 2001
Format:Paperback
When one goes through a hell of an ordeal (an indelible memory left etched on a soul) how does one cope with it's affects? This is a question that Julia Blackburn explores in The Leper's Companions.
In her story, time plays an important part of her character's dealing with the grief she's experienced. When the story opens the narrator is in the present, in a state of mourning for the loss of a loved one. Someone who has been lost to her for an indefinite amount of time. It seems only appropriate that from then on the narrator finds herself far in the past, observing the life and trials of people seemingly far removed from her experience.
It is as if, she, by focusing on their lives each in order, is some how also focusing on corresponding aspects of
her own life and grief. She does this in a such a quiet way it's almost easy to forget that she's there observing things. There is such a quietness about this process that it is if your were embarking on it with her and were seeing the people for yourself. You go on this journey with her and when she reaches the place she was going to you have to.
I think this is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It's flow and message have left me much to ponder. It has given me much insight on how we deal with and get rid of the grief we carry inside.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
a spellbinding parable
30 May 2002
Format:Hardcover
I really liked Julia Blackburn's little book. It is exquisitely written in lean & learned detail, & carries the Reader off into another time & another place where our ancestors tried to make sense of what they saw, believed & felt.
This is a rare book to encounter about what it might have been like to live 800 years ago on the coast of a sparsely-settled land, where a new religion interfaces with the old, where life is so fragile before the onslaught of the weather, relationships are infused with hallucinations, & pilgrimages to the Holy Land undertaken in dire poverty & total surrender.
THE LEPER'S COMPANIONS is about a grieving woman & her travel through that hurt into healing.
A pearl of a parable that glows with authenticity, & I hope it comes into reprint so that it can thrill others as it did me. Until then go hunt up a used copy, I'm not selling mine!
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