The Nature of Blood

The Nature of Blood

Summary

The Nature of Blood is an unforgettable novel about loss and persecution, about courage and betrayal, and about the terrible pain yet absoulte necessity of human memory.

A young Jewish woman growing up in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth century Venice are bound by personal crisis and momentous social conflict. What emerges is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with sameness and difference, with blood.

Reviews

  • An astonishing novel: ambitious, pithy, beautifully written and - above all - brave enough to tackle the great, public issues of our century without pity, prurience or maudlin sentiment
    Independent

About the author

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Crossing the River (shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1993) and A Distant Shore (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2004). Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN Open Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Granta Best of Young British Writers 1993. He has also written for television, radio, theatre and film.
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