In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted an illness that left him stone deaf. Yet he continued to interact with the world and to create, spending the next thirty-five years in a world emptied of sound but bursting with images of pageantry, cruelty, and pathos.

In this brilliant, idiosyncratic book - a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation - Julia Blackburn vividly imagines the artist's world during this time. She recreates the artist's friendships and love affairs and breathes life into the subjects of his paintings: an...

Few jazz singers have become icons like Billie Holiday. In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people who knew Billie best: 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 contrary to myth knew what she wanted and what really mattered to her. Julia Blackburn has pieced together an oral history of this jazz great, creating a unique and fascinating view of an astonishing woman."

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An account of Napoleon's six years on the island of St. Helena describes the island's strange history and recounts the stories, myths, and absurdities.

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.

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.

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...

This blend of documentary and fiction describes the author's search for Daisy Bates, an eccentric woman who lived alone in the deserts of South Australia in the early years of the century and whose accounts of her time there make no distinction between fact and fantasy.

Wandering through dreams and nightmares from Praslin Islands to Mauritius and then to England, the author unfolds the troubled lives of her forbears, cursed by racial prejudice, sexual inhibition and recurrent mental illness. This first novel is an expurgation of personal feelings, drawing the reader into a landscape like that of a Dali painting.

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 the villagers on a pilgrimage: across the North Sea to Venice, and then along the Mediterranean coast to the Holy Land.