White Blood - Hardcover

Fleming, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224077996 ISBN 13: 9780224077996

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2006

Synopsis

The son of an English father and Russian mother, Charlie Doig is a big man - big in stature and big in spirit. A naturalist, he roughs it around the world collecting birds and insects for museums. In 1914 he's on a mission for the Academy of Scientists in Russian Turkestan when war breaks out. His pay is stopped and his companion goes off to enlist. Doig, however, has no intention of volunteering to be killed. He returns to the Pink House, his family's home near Smolensk, and to the woman he loves, his cousin Elizaveta.

At first the Pink House remains almost untouched by outside events, and the familiar ways continue as before. But imperial Russia is doomed and with it all the old certainties. When Elizaveta's fiancé is assassinated, Charlie fulfils his greatest wish and himself takes her as his bride. The very next morning he finds two men, soldiers by the look of them, approaching the house through the falling snow. Against all his instincts, he gives them shelter.

What follows is almost unbearable in its tension. Trapped by the snow with Doig and his new wife are a motley collection of old aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on - and the two soldiers, one of whom, Prokhor Glebov, Doig is convinced is a Bolshevik out to destroy them all.

Beautifully written, by turns savage and tender, this compelling novel confirms James Fleming as one of the very best novelists we have.

About this title

Review:

"A meticulously researched act of reconstruction... The narrative, the dialogue and the intensity of Doig's emotions drive the story to a savage climax that reads like a modern thriller. It is the best sort of historical novel" (Honor Clerk Spectator)

"An extremely wintry and hard hitting adventure story...told in an intimate, chatty style and in prose of great originality and angularity - this is a historical evocation at times as powerful as the account of pre-1914 Berlin that the late great Sybille Bedford gave us in A Legacy...readers will surely welcome its author to the ranks of our greatest storytellers" (Andrew Barrow Literary Review)

"Beautifully written, with baroque energy and style" (Jessica Mann Sunday Telegraph)

"Provincial aristocratic life - the milieu of Turgenev and Chekhov - is evoked with affection and humour, while our knowledge of its imminent doom imbues the proceedings with tragic tension and poignancy. The wait is unbearable, and when the Bolshevik horror finally arrives, it is much more unbearable. A comic pastoral, a culture in microcosm, dissolves into universal cataclysm, into Hell." (Lewis Jones Daily Telegraph)

"Fleming finds an unencumbered, historically penetrating language in which the simplest expository sentences can bring prose, story and setting into a crisp and evocative alignment" (Sam Thompson Guardian)

From the Publisher:

A compelling historical thriller set in Russia on the brink of the Revolution

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0224077996
• ISBN 13: 9780224077996
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368