Dreaming the Karoo

An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It’s a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction. – Olivia Laing, author of EVERYBODY
Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers… Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity and power. Again and again, as I read, I gasped at the intense relevance and importance, as well as the beauty of this book. – Hugh Brody, author of THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN
A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution. – William Atkins, author of EXILES
A fascinating, poetic response to our contemporary age. – Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review *
[Blackburn’s] wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a drily downbeat humour and a genius for serendipity… Blackburn doesn’t give us answers. Instead she works a miracle. In this book dead people talk in a dead language, describing a culture and way of life which is also dead, and yet, thanks to…Blackburn’s tactful, beautifully-framed extrapolations, those dead come before us and speak. – Lucy Hughes-Hallett * New Statesman *
Parallels [with the present] bring complexity and immediacy to the book… Blackburn powerfully evokes the Karoo… Her observations of her fellow travellers are insightful. – Barnaby Phillips * Times Literary Supplement *
[Blackburn’s] writing of history and memory - both personal and public - is so deft as to seem effortless. This elliptical and bewitching book is a delight. * Spectator *
Dreaming the Karoo is at once a mesmerising meandering into the near-extinct language and sensibility of the /Xam, and a diary of that intangible sense of loss and loneliness that so many of us felt during lockdown. * Tablet *
It is such a wonderful book. It made me stretch my hand to my lover. It made me want to show my children the footprints, scars and stones under our feet. It made me want to sit down to look at the sea… It made me deeply grateful that I am alive. * Max Porter (Praise for Time Song) *
Both Wordsworthian and Woolfian … This book is a wonder. * Adam Nicolson (Praise for Time Song) *

Julia Blackburn has written ten books of non-fiction, the most recent of which, Time Song, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize. Her family memoir The Three of Us won the 2009 J.R. Ackerley Award, and her two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper’s Companions, were both shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Suffolk and Italy.

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