Manituana is the latest from the collective of four young Italian writers who call themselves Wu Ming. Set during the Revolutionary War, Manituana blends fact and fiction in a story that centers around a New World family of mixed British and Native American descent. The Johnson-Brandt clan lives in a world that is familiar but not immediately of its time: hunter-gathering and Indian cosmology are part of a way of life that also includes violin-playing and living in stone houses rather than teepees. With fleeting glimpses of historical figures, set-piece battle narratives and epic wilderness scenes, Manituana weaves the chaos of the civil war and the founding of a new nation into a story on the heroic scale of The Last of the Mohicans, and with a cult appeal similar to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.