Beyond the Ties of Blood
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In the tradition of Isabel Allende, a family saga that explores the lives touched by the tragedies of Chile's vibrant history
Imprisoned and tortured in the aftermath of the 1973 coup while her love, Manuel, is savagely murdered, Eugenia Aldunate is a rare survivor of the countless "disappeared" that would haunt Chile's collective memory for decades. While still in prison, Eugenia discovers she is pregnant and is exiled to Mexico, then the United States to raise her daughter alone, forbidden to return. She builds a quiet life for herself, but the scars on her arms to do not fade. Horrific nightmares plague Eugenia each night, while each morning she aches for her homeland.
Nearly twenty years after her exile, Eugenia is called back to Chile to testify in Manuel's murder and seek justice for the others who disappeared. A rare living witness to these "camps," Eugenia must come to grips with the legacy of violence and trauma inflicted by Pinochet's dictatorship and find truth and solace in the stories of those she left behind.
In the tradition of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of Butterflies, Beyond the Ties of Blood is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the transcendence of family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Mallon's debut novel, college student Eugenia Aldunate falls madly for Manuel Bronstein, a leftist rebel, during Pinochet's brutal ascension in Chile. Manuel's activism lands them both in prison, where they're tortured, and where Eugenia learns that she's pregnant. After her release, she flees to Mexico, where she raises her daughter, Laura, and becomes a human rights journalist. Years later, while Eugenia is on a teaching fellowship in Boston, Pinochet is deposed and Eugenia is asked to testify before Chile's Truth Commission. Still haunted by the past, she returns to a family and country that have grown alien to her, and confronts the staggering losses that have made her alien to herself. Mallon conveys both the breathtakingly epic and heartbreakingly personal fallout of the bloody 1973 coup, successfully highlighting the sacrifices borne by generations of women and the small-scale moral dislocation of large-scale atrocity. But she also leans heavily on hackneyed conventions that flatten her extraordinary characters, rendering their relationships perfunctory and the plot progression mechanical. Eugenia, Laura, and Sara, all of them ostensibly strong, accomplished women, are buoyed more by emotion than conviction, a quality that elevates them as spiritual martyrs while diminishing their agency and authenticity.
