Title: The nature of blood
Description: A novel about personal crisis and momentous social conflict, Caryl Phillips sixth novel tells the inextricably linked stories of a young Jewish woman growing up in mid-twentieth-century Germany, and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth-century Venice. At the heart of these stories is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with similarity and difference, with blood. This is a novel about how we define ourselves and consequently, it is about the most dangerous and nightmarish aspects of our identity.
Subjects: Fiction, History, Pogroms, Jews, Persecutions, Literature, Romans, nouvelles, Juifs, Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), Racism, Fiction, historical, general, Israel, fiction, Jews, fiction
Places: Venice (Italy), Israel, Italy
Time periods: 16th century, 1948-1967