Endowing family horrors with mythical resonance, Marcello Fois creates
an unforgettable tale of twentieth-century Sardinia. 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
and their own tragedy.