Novels
- The Book of Colour (1995)
- The Leper’s Companions (1999)
Collections
- My Animals and Other Family (2007)
Non fiction
- Charles Waterton, 1782-1865 (1989)
- Daisy Bates in the Desert (1994)
- The Emperor’s Last Island (2000)
- Old Man Goya (2002)
- With Billie (2005)
- The Three of Us (2008)
- Thin Paths (2011)
- Threads (2015)
- Time Song (2019)
- Dreaming the Karoo (2022)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Julia Blackburn Books Overview
The Book of Colour
In the late 19th century, an English missionary arrives on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, intent on wiping our fornication among the natives. Instead he incurs a curse that strikes first his dark skinned wife, then his son and grandson. But is the curse supernatural or a white man’s guilty fascination with an alien new world? ‘A hypnotic, cryptic, haunting exploration of the power of memory.’ Boston Globe. From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Leper’s Companions
In this fascinatingly imaginative novel, Julia Blackburn has decimated all the rules, creating a magical tale that is part fable, part allegory, part present, part past, and wholly genuine and poetic. The unnamed protagonist has recently lost someone she loved, and her solution is to abandon the present, and the overwhelming pain. The seamless narrative lands her in a medieval seaside village where mermaids wash ashore, devils haunt in packs, a child is born with the head of a fish, and where one day, quite out of nowhere, there emerges a sage and wandering leper. The leper leads a small group of the villagers, including the protagonist, on a journey to Jerusalem, a harrowing pilgrimage that compels all the travelers to confront their deepest selves. Exquisite and lyrical, The Lepers Companions is a heart rending tale by one of our most fiercely original storytellers.
Charles Waterton, 1782-1865
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.
Daisy Bates in the Desert
In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. Brilliantly reviewed, astonishingly original, this ‘eloquent and illuminating portrait of an extraordinary woman’ New York Times Book Review tells a fascinating, true story in the tradition of Isak Dinesen and Barry Lopez.
The Emperor’s Last Island
In 1814 Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on St. Helenad surreal exile that would last until his death six years later. ‘A resonant meditation on exile, fame, the stories we tell about ourselves and the bigger stories we tell about our great figures.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Old Man Goya
In 1792, when he was forty seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness that left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book, Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence, and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw around him into visionary paintings, drawings, and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who accompanied him to the end. Blackburn’s singular distinction as a biographer is her uncanny ability to create a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation to think herself into another world. In Goya she has found the perfect subject. Visiting the towns Goya frequented, reading the revelatory letters that he wrote for years to a boyhood friend, investigating the subjects he portrayed, Julia Blackburn writes about the elderly painter with the intimacy of an old friend, seeing through his eyes and sharing the silence in his head. With unprecedented immediacy and illumination, Old Man Goya gives us an unparalleled portrait of the artist.
With Billie
From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it. Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure. In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.
The Three of Us
This is the story of three people: Julia Blackburn; her father, Thomas; and her mother, Rosalie. Thomas was a poet and an alcoholic who for many years was addicted to barbiturates, which would often make him violent. Rosalie, a painter, was sociable and flirtatious; she treated Julia as her sister, her confidante, and eventually as her deadly sexual rival. After Julia’s parents divorced, her mother took in lodgers, always men, on the understanding that each would become her lover. When one of the lodgers started an affair with Julia, Rosalie was devastated; when he later committed suicide, the relationship between mother and daughter was shattered irrevocable. Or so it seems until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life. At last the spell was broken, and they were able to talk with an ease they had never known before. When she was very near the end, Rosalie said to Julia, Now you will be able to write about me, won t you? The Three of Us is a memoir like no other you have read. The writing is magical, and the story is extraordinary, not only for its honest but also for its humor and its lack of blame. Ultimately, this is a tale of redemption, a love story. It will surely become one of the classics of that genre.