Isabel Allende

An orphan brought up by a Victorian spinster in Chile, Eliza Sommers falls in love with Joaquin. When he goes to California to seek his fortune in the gold rush, Eliza follows, but when she finally hears news of him she has to decide what true love is.

Isabel Allende has placed her heroine against the background of a turbulent South American country where love, politics, tragedy and disaster shape her life.

Set in an unnamed Latin American country with a turbulent history, this is also the history of the Trueba family; their passions, struggles and secrets of three generations.

Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, the pianist Roser, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into exile.

When opportunity to seek refuge arises, they board a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to Chile, the promised 'long petal of sea and wine and snow'. There, they find themselves enmeshed in a rich web of characters who come together in love and tragedy over the course of four generations, destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world.

In this memoir Isabel Allende explores events of her own life and those of her homeland, Chile. She takes the reader on a highly personal tour of the country she loves and lived in until the assassination of her cousin, President Salvador Allende.

Set in a country of arbitrary arrests, disappearances and summary executions, this is the story of the passionate affair between Irene Beltran, a journalist and photographer Francisco Leal. It is also about their search for justice and truth.

Despite growing up a rich, privileged young woman in San Francisco, Aurora del Valle is unhappy. Haunted by nightmares and childhood memories she travels to Chile to discover what had such an effect on her early life.

For Amanda Martín and her online friends, Ripper was just a game. Free from any moral and legal restraints, they pursue any line of enquiry to solve cases that the police cannot. But when Amanda’s mother suddenly vanishes, will Amanda and her online accomplices solve the mystery before it’s too late?

As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one's sexuality.

So what do women want? To be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved. On all these fronts, there is much work to be done, and this book, Allende hopes, will 'light the torch of our daughters and granddaughters with mine. They will have to live for us, as we lived for our mothers, and carry on with the work still left to be finished.

Rolf Carle asks his lover, Eva Luna, to tell him a story, and so she begins to weave for him stories of passion, love and death, all set in the landscapes of South America.

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first daughter in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events. The ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

Told in the form of a letter to someone Violeta loves above all others, this is the story of a hundred-year life - of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Bearing witness to a century of history, it is a life shaped by the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics. 

In Southern California in the late eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is the child of a Spanish aristocrat and a Shoshone warrior. When he witnesses injustice, especially to Native Americans, he joins a secret movement dedicated to helping the powerless, so taking his first steps to becoming a hero, - and Zorro!