Bloodlines

When Guiseppe Mundula first sees Michele Angelo Chironi across the corridor of a Sardinian orphanage, the blacksmith realizes that he has found the son and heir he never knew he needed. And when a few years later, Michele himself looks down from the ladder on which he is working and sees the beautiful Mercede, he knows that he has found the woman he will marry. So begins Fois' magisterial domestic epic of the lives, loves, and losses of the Chironi family as they struggle through war and fascism. Deftly endowing familial horrors with mythical resonance, Fois creates a Dantesque triptych that inscribes the history of twentieth-century Sardinia, and sweeping changes across Europe, onto the historical tablet of a single misbegotten household.