The Book of Color, revolved around a curse; her second, however, is all about miracles--double-edged though they might be. The narrator is a nameless woman who has recently lost someone she loved. "What she wanted to do now was to bang the door shut on this present time by setting out on a journey to some distant country and staying there until the present had blurred and shifted and become indistinguishable from the past. But that was not possible." A page later, we discover that, indeed, it is. At first, the narrator imagines herself in a nearby village, walking along the sandy beach or visiting the ancient church, its stones covered in lichen. Then, "one night in the month of February, when the east wind was bitterly cold and she felt so sad she didn't know what to do, she found herself going down the main street of the village." Only now the street is rutted with the tracks of carts, the houses are small and battered and the church is newly built--the past has, indeed, become indistinguishable from the present, for now it is the year 1410. This is the year a mermaid washes up on the beach, bringing with her, apparently, a litany of disaster: a child born with a fish's head, a dead cow, a creeping blindness. In the village there is a woman beset by devils; a blind shoemaker who goes mad when his sight is restored; a leper who is miraculously cured; a young widow who eats a map and is filled with longing for faraway lands. All, including the narrator, eventually embark on a long and arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, from which only two will return. The Leper's Companions is beautifully written and its world of wonders is sufficiently rich to keep one turning the pages until the very end. Yet each event seems curiously isolated from all the rest, giving this novel an episodic feel that leaves the reader wishing for a little more substance beneath the beguiling surface. --Alix Wilber
]]>