My Invented Country

Isabel Allende was born in 1942, and is the niece of Salvador Allende, who went on to become famous as the elected President of Chile deposed in a CIA-backed coup. She worked as a journalist, playwright and children’s writer in Chile until 1974 and then in Venezuela until 1984. Her first novel for adults, ‘The House of the Spirits’, was published in Spanish in 1982, beginning life as a letter to her dying grandfather. It was an international sensation, and ever since all her books have been acclaimed and adored in numberless translations worldwide.

‘Allende’s writing is so vivid we smell the countryside, hear the sounds, see the bright birds, the scorched earth, smell and even taste the soft fruit.’ The Times‘Allende has a gift for conversational writing and a sharp sense of humour…I very much enjoyed this visit to the other Chile, that half-remembered country of her imagination.’ New Statesman‘Allende is incapable of telling a bad story. She writes of her own experience with a kind of wild candour. Her heroically sustained narrative, her lovingly prepared plots and surprise inventions explode in an exaltation.’ Independent‘Lucid, original and expounded with an unquestionable sense of humor…part essay and part autobiography…When Allende poses sweeping general truths, she leaves room for argument…But the book gets my undivided attention when it expounds on the relationship of the author to that country of hers, invented, imaginary, fictional, to the story of her family, which is itself invented memory, and to her vocation as a narrator…It will provoke curiosity. And that is where everything begins.’ LA Times