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9780099752110

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A melancholy and exquisitely bizarre essay on fame, morality and the vanity of human wishes * London Review of Books * Moving and original... Julia Blackburn writes like an angel -- Mary Wesley Pure enchantment, stranger than fiction * Cosmopolitan *

A melancholy and exquisitely bizarre essay on fame, morality and the vanity of human wishes London Review of Books Moving and original... Julia Blackburn writes like an angel -- Mary Wesley Pure enchantment, stranger than fiction Cosmopolitan

A melancholy and exquisitely bizarre essay on fame, morality and the vanity of human wishes * London Review of Books * Moving and original... Julia Blackburn writes like an angel -- Mary Wesley Pure enchantment, stranger than fiction * Cosmopolitan *

This compulsive book has two main characters - an embittered Napoleon on the island of St Helena, where he was exiled and died, and the author who followed him there. Combining autobiography, history, travel and the style of a novel, it dares to confound all the borders put on travel writing. In capturing the claustrophobia of St Helena with disturbing honesty, it reveals how islands - often portrayed as paradises - can also be prisons. (Kirkus UK)

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Julia Blackburn has written five books of non-fiction - Charles Waterton, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya and With Billie - a family memoir, The Three of Us, which won the 2009 J. R. Ackerley Award, and two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the author of seventeen short stories specially commisioned by BBC Radio, a selection of which were published in My Animals and Other Family, and four radio plays, including The Spellbound Horses.

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