As The Leper's Companions begins, we know only that the narrator has lost someone she loves, and in her bereavement she creates a past in which she might both lose and find herself: a fifteenth-century village in a land of living hybrids and walking spirits, inexplicable afflictions and miraculous reawakenings. She joins a group of pilgrims -- an old man and his pregnant daughter, a priest, a shoemaker and his wife, a dying woman, a leper -- on their way to Jerusalem. Moving effortlessly between the magic and the real, the past and the present, their journey transcends the physical terrain, taking us into the intricate emotional lives of each of the travelers, reflecting and ultimately redefining the life of the narrator herself.