Back to Blood
First edition
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| Author | Tom Wolfe |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction novel |
| Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
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Publication date
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2012 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 704 pp. |
| ISBN | |
Back to Blood is Tom Wolfe's fourth novel, published by Little, Brown. The novel, set in Miami, Florida, focuses on the subject of Cuban immigrants there.
Wolfe's 1998 novel A Man in Full, about a real-estate mogul in Atlanta during that city's economic boom of the 1990s, was a considerable success. An estimated 1.4 million copies of the book were sold in hardcover alone. Wolfe followed A Man in Full with 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons, the story of a sheltered teenage girl attending a fictitious prestigious university where she is forced to navigate the world of undergraduate athletics, emerging sexuality and academic integrity. The book was considered disappointing by many critics, and sales were much lower: Nielsen BookScan, which covers roughly 70 percent of book sales, placed hardback sales at 293,000 copies and paperback sales at 138,000.
All of Wolfe's essay collections, non-fiction, and fiction had been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux since his first book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965. But after the relatively disappointing sales of I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe was unable to agree on terms for the new novel with his publisher of 42 years. The Associated Press reported that Wolfe had been offered a reduced advance for Back to Blood. An excerpt from the novel was shown to several publishers; Wolfe sold the rights to publish his novel to Little, Brown for a sum of close to US$7 million, according to The New York Times, in an auction that ended shortly before Christmas of 2007.
Even before the novel was finished, some details were reported in the media. The novel has been described as Wolfe's take on "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first." Racial anxieties were a key source of tension in The Bonfire of the Vanities—Back to Blood will similarly feature characters of Cuban, Haitian, Russian, and French ancestry in the melting pot of Miami.
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Wikipedia