Blood Kin
By Ceridwen Dovey
(Viking Adult, Hardcover, 9780670018567, 192pp.)
Publication Date: March 2008
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Paperback (March 2009)
Categories: Literary, Political
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A president has been overthrown by a military coup in a nameless country in an unspecified era. The president's barber, chef, and portraitist are imprisoned, with many others, in a remote palace in the hills high above the city center. Before the coup, these three men worked with unquestioning loyalty, serving the president in seemingly benign jobs. Now, forced to serve the country's new leader, they begin to reconsider their role in the old regime.
In simple, elegant prose Blood Kin alternates between the voices of the barber, the chef, and the portraitist. Later in the book their wives, lovers, and daughters tell their own tales. As the old order falls, so does the veil that hides the truth about these men and women's secret passions. No one, it seems, is entirely immune to the many temptations of power.
Ceridwen Dovey's debut is a welcome addition to the important tradition of allegorical writing about political upheaval and personal guilt. Her clever, magnetic story will resonate with fans of J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel GarcÃa MÃrquez.
Ceridwen Dovey grew up in South Africa and Australia. A graduate of Harvard University, she is now a doctoral student in anthropology at New York University. Her stories "Vasbyt" and "Coma Karma" were selected for the anthology African Road: New Writing from Southern Africa, judged by J. M. Coetzee.
?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
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