As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, an ambitious young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; a psychiatrist who specialises in sex addiction and his Latina nurse by day, mistress by night - until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, 'de-skilled' conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, 'spectators' at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

Tom Wolfe...remains The Dude when it comes to surveying the crazed, bracing absurdities of our national life. Back to Blood is marked by both Wolfe's stylistic freneticim and his formidable reportorial gifts. Beginning his ninth decade, Tom Wolfe has brio to burn. -- Douglas Kennedy The Times If this novel were rushed into A&E, it would immediately be put under heavy sedatipm. -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times Back to Blood dazzles so much that you might want to read it through dark glasses. In terms of scale, setting and purpose, we are very much back in Bonfire. -- Simon O'hagan Independent on Sunday Tom Wolfe returns with a thunderous thwack, fizzing outrageously at the age of 81 with a slipstreamed comet of a novel. All Human Life is Here!... It's even better than his great hit The Bonfire of the Vanities. Unmissable stuff. -- Tom Adair Scotsman This is an exhilarating novel. The satire is scalpel-like and very funny. -- Wynn Wheldon Spectator

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his BA at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.