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The Leper's Companions
 
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The Leper's Companions (Hardcover)

by Julia Blackburn (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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11 used from £0.01
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Hardcover (First Edition) 36 used & new from £0.01
Paperback (New edition) £7.99 £7.19 27 used & new from £0.01

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Pantheon Books; First Edition, First Impression edition (April 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0679439846
  • ISBN-13: 978-0679439844
  • Product Dimensions: 21 x 14 x 1.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 3,214,420 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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.


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The Leper's Companions 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely enchanting story! beautiful written, 5 Jun 2002
This review is from: The Leper's Companions (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!
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5.0 out of 5 stars a spellbinding parable, 30 May 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Leper's Companions (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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