Blood Kin

This novel is not set in any particular country, time or place. The characters have no identifying physical characteristics. They don't have names. We simply know them as the ex-president's barber, chef, and portraitist; men who perform essential tasks and try not to see what's happening around them. Our three men are held captive in the ex-President's Summer Palace as a military Commander destroys the old regime. All three men start to provide their services for the Commander, just as they did for the President before the coup, but before long, they question the Commander's authority and things begin to unravel. The mysterious connections between these men and their lovers come to the surface; and we discover that nobody is as innocent as he or she seems. Each one of them is attempting to atone for or cover up acts of cruelty, whether personal or political. In the end, who will manage to resist the corruptive force of power and who will give in?

“The most erotic novel you might ever read about political gamesmanship and power…”
–John Freeman (former President of the National Book Critics Circle), Newark Star Ledger

“A precise and terrifying debut novel…[BLOOD KIN offers] candid and chilling insights into the seductive nature of power.…Dovey’s ultimate lesson, that nature and mankind abhor a power vacuum, may be a bleak one, but she presents her case so meticulously and relentlessly that you’ve got to respect her authority.” –New York Times Book Review

“Part erotic thriller, part menacing political allergory, [BLOOD KIN is] Ceridwen Dovey’s haunting debut… Dovey infuses each character with humanity and brilliantly reveals how banal acts like cooking and shaving can become charged with longing and political intent.”
—Vogue

“Dovey’s surgical prose and cool apprehension of the machinations of ambition and lust make her a writer to watch.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A compact but ambitious fable…Dovey displays a mastery over her material and the pacing of her narrative worthy of a much more experienced writer.”
—Elle Magazine

“Splendid debut novel [about] power, political and personal, and its dangerous ineffability.”
—Bookforum

"A fable of the arrogance of power, beneath whose dreamlike surface swirl currents of complex sensuality."
—JM Coetzee, Nobel prize-winning author of Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians

"This is an unflinching and poignant work that exposes man's limitations and vulnerabilities in the face of absolute power. It has about it something of the splendor and inevitability of a myth. Like all wonderful books, it has always been there, waiting for its author to arrive. And, thankfully for us, she has come."
—Hisham Matar, author of In the Country of Men (shortlisted for 2006 Man Booker)

"A lovely, haunting novel, written with great care and precision. Working on the level of allegory, with a careful consideration of history and myth, Ceridwen Dovey has fashioned a really fine debut."
—Colum McCann, author of international bestsellers This Side of Brightness and Dancer

Blood Kin - Other formats:

eBook - Microsoft Reader: $23.95

eBook - Palm reader: $23.95

eBook - Adobe reader: $23.95

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