White Blood
James Fleming
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 is on a mission for the Academy of Sciences 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, adn to the woman he loves, his cousin Elizaveta.
At first the Pink House remains untouched by outside events, and the familiar ways continue as before. But Imperial Russia is doomed and with in all the old certainties. Trapped by the snow with Doig and Elizaveta are a motley collection of old aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on - and the two soldiers, one of whom Doig is convinced is a Bolshevik out to destroy them all.
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About James Fleming
Reviews for White Blood
Honor Clerk
Spectator
Highly entertaining... superbly handled
William Palmer
Independent
Beautifully written, with baroque energy and style
Jessica Mann
Sunday Telegraph
Moves at a cracking pace with plenty of atmosphere and sympathy
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
This is a tense, thrilling and at times darkly comic novel with a complex central character who... bursts off the page
Time Out
An extremely wintry and hard hitting adventure story...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
Literary Review
Virile, ruthless, adventurous
Independent