Heritage A Novel

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, with its 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 put down roots there in the late nineteenth century. His son, Lazare, back from World War I’s hellish trenches, would live there with his wife and build in their garden the most beautiful aviary in the Andes.
    That’s where their daughter Margot, a pioneering aviator, would first dream of flying, and where she would raise her son, the revolutionary Ilario Da. Like Lazare before them, they will bravely face the conflicts of their day, fighting against dictatorship on both sides of the Atlantic.
    In this captivating saga, Miguel Bonnefoy paints the portrait of an endearing, uprooted family whose terrible dilemmas, caused by the blows of history, reveal their deep humanity.

Miguel Bonnefoy was born in France in 1986 to a Venezuelan mother and a Chilean father. His two previous novels, Octavio’s Journey and Black Sugar, have sold more than thirty thousand copies each in France and have been translated into several languages. In 2013 Bonnefoy was awarded the Prix du Jeune Écrivain. Heritage has received widespread critical acclaim in France, including being short-listed for the Prix Femina, Grand Prix de l'Académie française, and the Goncourt Prize.

Emily Boyce is an editor and translator based in London. Her translations include works by Antoine Laurain, Pascal Garnier, and Laurent Gaudé, and two previous novels by Miguel Bonnefoy. She was short-listed for the 2016 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Éric Faye's Nagasaki.