Compare prices for julia blackburn
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Vintage Old Man Goya
Julia Blackburn has already established herself as one of the finest writers of non-fiction, but with <I>Old Man Goya</I> she takes her ability to re-create the past to a new level in her haunting evocation of the final years of the great Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya. Partly inspired by the painful loss her own mother (who was also a painter), Blackburn's desire to write about Goya developed when she learnt that in 1792, at the age of 47, the painter went permanently deaf; I wanted to know what sort of world this deaf man had inhabited and how he had managed to live with the isolation of deafness and how it had changed the way he used his remaining senses. The result is a remarkably perceptive voyage into Goya's mind, which hovers between history and fiction, as Blackburn moves between the death of her own mother, visits to Goya's old haunts in Spain and France, and the painter's own remarkable lust for life in the midst of domestic upheavals and the horrors of warfare in early 19th-century Spain. <p> <I>Old Man Goya</I> moves from Goya's early days as a rich court painter, creating dozens of designs of light-hearted subjects, to the trauma of deafness, the devastation of the bloody Peninsula War that swept Iberia between 1807 and 1812, the death of his first wife and old age with a mistress half his age. Interspersed amongst the text are 23 beautiful Goya copperplates through which Blackburn can see Goya, a silent witness who makes no comment, but gives a shape to everything he sees, whose relish for the absurd, the cruel and the carnivalesque remained with him throughout his long life. Blackburn's elegant prose and unerring eye for domestic and artistic detail creates a wonderfully compassionate portrait of Goya, and she happily concedes to being caught up in the spinning energy of the man as he hurtled relentlessly through the years, a journey that her readers will find well worth pursuing. --<I>Jerry Brotton</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£6.39
at Amazon.co.uk
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Jonathan Cape With Billie
Pages: 352, Hardcover, Jonathan Cape
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£17.09
at Amazon.co.uk
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Vintage The Leper's Companions
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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Julia Blackburn--whose previous novel <I>The Book of Colour</I> 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. --<I>Lisa Gee</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
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Vintage The Emperor's Last Island: Journey to St.Helena
Pages: 256, Paperback, Vintage
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Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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£6.39
at Amazon.co.uk
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Vintage With Billie
Pages: 368, Paperback, Vintage
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Shipping: refer to store website
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£6.39
at Amazon.co.uk
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