The Emperor's Last Island: A Journey to St Helena

Description

'A magically idiosyncratic collage of history, biography and travel writing, permeated with madness and fantasy, absurdity and despair... Bewitching' - The Times The Emperor's Last Stand is a book about St Helena, an island with a sad, strange history, and about the tangle of stories and myths, absurdities and simple facts that have accumulated around Napoleon and his sojourn here. It follows him through the eyes of those who lived with him, who guarded him, who managed only to catch a brief glimpse of him, alive or dead. It is also a personal account- a description of Julia Blackburn's own journey to St Helena and at the same time a journey through the private memories and associations evoked by the telling of this poignant and curious story.

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.

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 *