Historical Novels by B. Ashford

In a village in northern Italy, the olive grove her grandfather planted is the one thing Rosa Rossi still recognizes as hers — everything else has slipped into a war she never wanted. Her three children are choosing sides she can’t control: Giovanni sails for America with a silver pendant around his neck and his mother’s blessing at his back; Marco pulls on a Blackshirt uniform and calls it duty; Lucia hides resistance pamphlets in the flour tin Rosa thought was hers alone.

For a decade, the Rossi family is pulled in four directions — an emigrant learning that eleven years won’t make a borrowed country his, a soldier who will have to stand trial for what his uniform required of him, a daughter setting charges on a rail line her own brother patrols, and a mother whose silence becomes its own quiet act of defiance.

When the family is finally seated together again, the questions aren’t about who was right. They’re about what’s left to forgive — and whether roots planted deep enough can survive being tested.

Enduring Roots is a family saga for readers of Kristin Hannah and Anthony Doerr: one family’s fracture and reckoning across the years Italy came apart, and came home.

On the night of 23 January 1973 the ground opens behind the town on Heimaey, in Iceland’s Westman Islands, and the fishing fleet carries most of its people to the mainland. Gunnar Ólafsson does not get on the family boat. He tears a page from the catch book, gives his brother Jón authority to act for Sólrún “in all matters until I say otherwise,” and stays behind. By February he is holding a hose against the lava.

Before the month is out, Jón has found a buyer for Sólrún. The eight-word telegram that would stop the sale stays folded in Gunnar’s coat.

Then three men at a table, with a child’s exercise book, start choosing which buried houses will be dug. Gunnar holds one claim, earned on the lava bank. He once stood up at a meeting in a hotel by the airfield and promised the islanders roofs by the winter; now he has to decide where his claim goes. His daughter Kristín, sixteen, has found her own place on a fish-plant line and wants to keep the tally.

Street by street, the town comes back. Gunnar goes on paying for the right to live where he is from, and a widow, Anna Jakobsdóttir, pledges her house against the boat he means to buy. What he pays, he does not get back.

For readers of Per Petterson, Claire Keegan and Kent Haruf.