Heritage

"A dazzling family saga, brimming with poetry and passion, that skillfully weaves together the private lives of individuals and major historical events in South America and Europe. The house on Calle Santo Domingo in Santiago de Chile, screened from view by three lush lemon trees, has sheltered three generations of the Lonsonier family. Having arrived from the harsh hills of France's Jura region with a single grape vine in one pocket and a handful of change in the other, the patriarch took root there in the late nineteenth century. His son, Lazare, back from WWI's hellish trenches, would live there with his wife, Thâeráese, and build the most beautiful aviary in the Andes in their garden. That's where their daughter Margot, a pioneering aviatrix, would first dream of flying, and where she would pair off with a strange soldier reappearing from the past to give birth to the revolutionary Ilario Da. Many years later, a cruel tragedy would strike the Lonsoniers. Caught in the eye of the storm, they will fly off to meet their fate together, carrying the mysterious legend of a vanished uncle as their sole legacy. In this captivating saga that unfolds on both sides of the Atlantic, Miguel Bonnefoy paints the portrait of several generations of an endearing, uprooted family whose terrible dilemmas, caused by the blows of history, reveal their deep humanity"--