White Blood
  • Published: 1 June 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099497080
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99

White Blood

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EBook
1 Feb 2011
Paperback
1 Jun 2007
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A compelling historical thriller set in Russia on the brink of the Revolution.

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.
  • Published: 1 June 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099497080
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

James Fleming

James Fleming, the nephew of Ian Fleming, was born in London in 1944. He is the author of several novels, all of them good: The Temple of Optimism, Thomas Gage, White Blood, Cold Blood and Rising Blood. He writes in Scotland. His website can be found at www.jamesfleming.co.uk

Also by James Fleming

Rising Blood
Cold Blood
Thomas Gage
The Temple of Optimism
See all

Praise for White Blood

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

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

Beautifully written, with baroque energy and style

Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph

This is a tense, thrilling and at times darkly comic novel with a complex central character who... bursts off the page

Time Out

Highly entertaining... superbly handled

William Palmer, Independent

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