Blood And Gold

Blood and Gold is the story of Marius, one of the oldest vampires in Rice's Chronicles, a Roman patrician and scholar who has survived from the time of the Emperor Augustus to the present day as the guardian of Akasha and Enkil, Those Who Must Be Kept. Rice traces Marius's millennia through his loves, his losses, and the Renaissance art he created under assumed identities, building a vampire whose story is inseparable from Western cultural history.

Roger Rees narrates with a classical authority that suits the novel's Roman origins and its sweep across two thousand years of history. The Vampire Chronicles' confessional structure, a vampire telling his story across centuries, rewards a voice with the range to hold both ancient Rome and contemporary Venice in the same performance, and Rees manages both.