Back To Blood: A Novel.

WOLFE, Tom.

Item Number: 75029

New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

First edition of Wolfe’s fourth novel. Octavo, original boards. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “To Edye…with a bow… Tom Wolfe.” The recipient, Edye Broad is an art collector, who along with her husband Eli have amassed a collection of about 2,000 pieces of art valued at more than $2 billion. Near fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Oliver Munday.

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay-with our hero, officer Nestor Camacho, on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running headlong into the only city in the world where people from a different country with a different language and a different culture have taken over at the ballot box. This melting pot is full of hard cases who just won't melt, damn it: a Cuban mayor; a black police chief; a hot young reporter and a timid editor of the Miami Herald, both WASPs who went to Yale; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist who keeps his lovely Latina nurse, Magdalena, in his bed and his star patient, a porn-addicted billionaire, on a string; a status-addled Haitian professor who thinks he's really French and wants his pale-skinned daughter to "pass" and his Creole-spouting son to be quiet. Then there are the clueless collectors who "See it! Like it! Buy it!," spending tens of millions per minute on de-skilled art at Miami Art Basel; black drug dealers colliding with the Cuban cops; Columbus Day Regatta "spectators" who only have eyes for the annual après-race orgy; and "Active Adult" condos full of yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers, not to mention a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, Back To Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.