Paperback. Fair. Remainder. Dust marks on edge of pages and general wear to edges.

The Leper's Companions

Science Fiction & Fantasy

BLACKBURN, Julia

Fantasy

Vintage

2006, British trade paperback edition, Vintage Books, London, UK. 354 pages. Very moving, detailed title regarding Billie Holiday, based on interviews that another young woman conducted, with more than 150 people who knew the singer and had many interesting things to say. Well received, well reviewed; this will offer fans a more rounded account of the tragic First Lady of Jazz.

With Billie

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Vintage Books

Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 
Winner of the New Angle Book Prize 2017\nJohn Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as ‘a stuporous state’. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of The Evacuation of Dunkirk.\nVery few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So - as with all her books - Julia Blackburn’s account of his life is far from a conventional biography. Instead it is a quest which takes her in many strange directions - to fishermen’s cottages in Sheringham, a grand hotel fallen on hard times in Great Yarmouth and to the isolated Watch House far out in the Blakeney estuary; to Cromer and the bizarre story of Einstein’s stay there, guarded by dashing young women in jodhpurs with shotguns.\nThreads is a book about life and death and the strange country between the two where John Craske seemed to live. It is also about life after death, as Julia’s beloved husband Herman, a vivid presence in the early pages of the book, dies before it is finished.\nIn a gentle meditation on art and fame; on the nature of time and the fact of mortality; and illustrated with Craske’s paintings and embroideries, Threads shows, yet again, that Julia Blackburn can conjure a magic that is spellbinding and utterly her own.

Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske

Humor & Entertainment

Book of Colour

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

During his lifetime Charles Waterton was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements and his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he was a notable Victorian figure who turned his park into an animal and bird sanctuary. He was an explorer of tropical rain forests in South America and became an authority on the poisons used by the South American Indians. He was also a taxidermist and published many books, numbering Darwin, Dickens and Roosevelt among his readers. Above all, he was a conservationist who fought to protect nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialization. The author draws on his surviving papers and seeks to counter the distorted view of him as a mere eccentric. Instead she seeks to reinstate him as the first conservationist of the modern age.

Charles Waterton 1782-1865: Traveller and Conservationist: Conservationist and Traveller

History

DAISY BATES IN THE DESERT: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines

In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years. In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Ms Bates says she was most happy. She fuses her own imagination and experience with that of Daisy Bates, unitl she seems to be recalling this other life as it it were her own.

Daisy Bates in the Desert

Leaders & Notable People

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random

With two extraordinary books, THE EMPEROR'S LAST LAND and DAISY BATES IN THE DESERT, Julia Blackburn has pushed the boundaries of non-fiction as far as they will go. IN THE BOOK OF COLOUR she crosses for the first time into fiction and the result is astonishing- a short visionary novel of almost awesome power, a book that changes your view of the world. THE BOOK OF COLOUR is a journey around Julia Blackburn's father and grandfather, set largely in Mauritius. It is a book about childhood, about madness, about the fear of miscegenation - and about a pig. It establishes Julia Blackburn as the most original English writer since Chatwin.

The Book of Colour

JONATHAN CAPE.

Physical description; 216 p. ; 22 cm. Notes; SIGNED by the author. NOT price-clipped. First edition and first printing. Summary; One morning in 1410, two men from an East-Coast fishing village find a mermaid washed up on the sand. This discovery starts a chain of events that leads four of our villages-the priest, the shoemaker's wife, the fisherman's daughter and the leper-on a pilgrimage: across the North Sea, to Venice and then along the Mediterranean coast to the Holy Land. With the magical imagination that has illumiated her previous books, Julia Blackburn travels with her pilgrims. At first she follows from Distance, but gradually she pulls closer until the five centuries between their time and ours dissolve and the author has entered their world. A spellbinding novel by one of the most original writers currently at work, The Leper's Companions is an extraordinary evocation of the medieval world-a book about birth and death, about destiny, about the courage to let go without the certainty of surviving, to journey with no certainty of return. Subjects; Pilgrims and pilgrimages - Fiction. England - Social life and customs - (1066-1485) - Fiction. Historical fiction ; Modern fiction. Fiction / Historical. Fiction / General.

The Leper's Companion

CAPE.

Old Man Goya

Arts & Photography

Pantheon Books

Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting new book is a life of Billie Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz. Billie Holiday is usually portrayed as a tragic victim of her own vices. These intimate stories - told by piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, a record producer, a theatre critic and two very different federal narcotics agents - give us a much deeper picture of her personality, at the same time as illuminating the dangerous and complex world she inhabited. Listening to their voices, we witness scenes from Billie's chaotic childhood. We see her when she first arrives in Harlem at the age of fourteen, and we follow her through her rise to fame and into the notoriety that came so close on its heels. Here she is in her dressing room, casually naked, her pubic hair dyed red, joking with the boys in the band. Here she is dancing with the federal narcotics agent who would later be involved in her arrest. Here she is knitting a red sweater for her piano player and then changing her mind and turning it into a jacket for her Chihuahua instead. Of course Billie's friends and lovers and fellow musicians talk about her troubles and her addictions, but they also have a lot to say about her warmth and her courage, and the ones who were really close to her understood that although she had a lot of men and drugs and booze in her life, all that really mattered was the singing.

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Books by BLACKBURN, Julia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BLACKBURN, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Leper's Companions

With Billie

Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske

Book of Colour

Charles Waterton 1782-1865: Traveller and Conservationist: Conservationist and Traveller

Daisy Bates in the Desert

The Book of Colour

The Leper's Companion

Old Man Goya

With Billie