Paula

With an enchanting blend of magical realism, politics, and romance reminiscent of her classic bestseller The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende presents a soul-baring memoir that seizes the reader like a novel of suspense.

Written for her daughter Paula when she became ill and slipped into a coma, Paula is the colorful story of Allende's life — from her early years in her native Chile, through the turbulent military coup of 1973, to the subsequent dictatorship and her family's years of exile. In the telling, bizarre ancestors reveal themselves, delightful and bitter childhood memories surface, enthralling anecdotes of youthful years are narrated and intimate secrets are softly whispered.

In an exorcism of death and a celebration of life, Isabel Allende explores the past, questions the gods, and creates a magical book that carries the reader from tears to laughter, from terror to sensuality to wisdom. In Paula, readers will come to understand that the miraculous world of her novels is the world Isabel Allende inhabits — it is her enchanted reality.

One of the most popular and acclaimed of Latin American authors presents an unforgettable memoir. An exquisitely rendered, deeply moving mother-daughter story that doubles as Allende's autobiography, Paula is a prodigious evocation and a hymn to life, written from the heart.

Nacida en PerÚ, Isabel Allende se criÓ en Chile. Algunos de sus libros, La casa de los espÍritus, De amor y sombra, Eva Luna, Cuentos de Eva Luna, El plan infinito,y mÁs recientemente, Paula, raducidos a mÁs de 25 lenguas, encabezan la lista de bestsellersen varios paises de America y Europa. Isabel Allende reside actualmente en California.

Born in Peru, Isabel Allende was raised in Chile. She is the author of the novels Portrait in Sepia, Daughter of Fortune, The Infinite Plan, Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows, and The House of the Spirits,the short story collection The Stories of Eva Luna,the memoir Paula,and Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. City of the Beast is her first novel for young readers. She lives in California.