Thin Paths
Julia Blackburn
Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award and the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize
Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999. She arrived as a stranger but a series of events brought her close to the old people of the village and they began to tell her their stories. Of how their village had been trapped in an archaic feudal system and owned by a local padrone who demanded his share of all they had, of the eruption of the Second World War, of the conflict between the fascists and the partisans, of death and fear and hunger of how they hid like like foxes in the mountains. 'Write it down for us,' they said, 'because otherwise it will all be lost.'
Thin Paths is a celebration of the songlines of one place that could be many places and a celebration of the humour and determination of the human spirit.
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About Julia Blackburn
Reviews for Thin Paths
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
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