Thin Paths

My book of the year. Beautiful, beguiling, memorable * Edmund de Waal *
Impossible to forget…beautiful and deeply humane * Sunday Times *
Profoundly moving…absorbing…and compassionate… Blackburn writes beautifully and despite its sorrows, Thin Paths is full of humour and pulsating life * Scotsman *
Marvellous… Her writing is as eloquent and elegant as ever * Literary Review *
A lyrical patchwork of fine-grained nature writing * Independent *
Reading Julia Blackburn’s account of her life in a remote corner of the Ligurian mountains is like lifting a stone to find a strange, intricate, hidden world…prose that is ruthlessly unsentimental, but full of love – Maggie Fergusson * Intelligent Life *
In Liguria Blackburn catches the last survivors, some in their nineties, in time to hear echoes of a culture that is already part of the past – Lee Langley * Spectator *
Julia Blackburn’s thoughtful book has a poet’s direct lyricism…a vivid, moving account * Metro *
Blackburn brings her special gift for the art of place to this lyrical account of the Italian mountain village where she and her husband settled. Although she writes superbly about landscape and wildlife, it’s her neighbours, and their haunting tales, who make the book sing * i *

Julia Blackburn has written five books of non-fiction - Charles Waterton, The Emperor’s Last Island, 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, which was broadcast in 2011.

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