When I was asked to write a description for this book it caused me to pause. I wanted to write that it was about history, about exiled Basque Portuguese Jews who were forced to immigrate to France, about French corsairs and the Great Pirates, about French colonization and the West Indies slave trade, about the exploration and settling of Canada, but the experience was too personal to be considered a survey of European history, and too broad to be considered just a family history.

I thought, to describe patterns in epigenetic behavior and ancestral memory, to make it about how in some mysterious way our ancestors tell us their stories, but I don't want you to think that it is a book about coincidence, because it is far from that. It is all of the above.