Tolstoy has always been so much a part of English literature as well as Russian that it comes as no surprise that behind James Fleming’s new novel of drama, guts and good old Russian melancholy looms the unavoidable presence of War and Peace. The protagonist of White Blood is Charlie Doig, son of a Scottish Moscow-based cotton-broker father and of a Russian mother, grand-daughter of the Tsar’s financier who provided the backing for Kutosov’s 1812 campaign. Whilst still a young boy, Doig loses his father to the plague and, sent back to school in England, embarks on a career as a naturalist in an act of entomological revenge. Bug- and bird-hunting for museums, in the company of the rigorously scientific Hartwig Goetz takes up the next eight years of his life and provides the backdrop of the first half of the novel. No over-equipped William Boot fresh from the Army & Navy, no Darwinian Stephen Maturin dispassionately rational in his collecting, Doig plunges into swamp and jungle, his methods minutely explained, his triumphs celebrated with a zeal — not to mention a bizarre use for eels — that few readers would be able to predict.

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