The Nature of Blood

A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips’ eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.