Long Sea Petal

 

Largo pétalo de mar (Spanish Edition) Paperback – Illustrated, April 7, 2020

by Isabel Allende

A journey through the history of the twentieth century by the hand of unforgettable characters who will discover that in a single life many lives fit and that, sometimes, the difficult thing is not to flee but to return.

In the middle of the Spanish Civil War, the young doctor Víctor Dalmau, together with his pianist friend Roser Bruguera, were forced to leave Barcelona, ​​go into exile and cross the Pyrenees towards France. On board the Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda that took more than two thousand Spaniards to Valparaíso, they will embark in search of peace and freedom that they did not have in their country. Received as heroes in Chile —that “long petal of sea and snow,” in the words of the Chilean poet—, they will be integrated into the social life of the country for several decades until the coup that overthrew Dr. Salvador Allende, Víctor's friend for their common love of chess. Víctor and Roser will find themselves uprooted again, but as the author says: "If one lives long enough, all circles close."

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Isabel Allende was born in 1942, in Peru. She spent her early childhood in Chile and lived in various places in her adolescence and youth. After the military coup of 1973 she in Chile she went into exile in Venezuela and, since 1987, she lives as an immigrant in California. She defines herself as an "eternal foreigner."

She started her literary career in journalism, in Chile and in Venezuela. In 1982 her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, became one of the mythical titles of Latin American literature. It was followed by many others, all of which have been international hits. Her work has been translated into forty languages ​​and has sold more than seventy million copies, being she the most widely read writer in the Spanish language. He has received more than sixty international awards, including the National Prize for Literature of Chile in 2010, the Hans Christian Andersen Prize in Denmark, in 2012, for his trilogy "Memories of the Eagle and the Jaguar" and the Medal of Freedom in the United States. Unidos, the highest civil distinction, in 2014. In 2018, Isabel Allende became the first writer in the Spanish language to be awarded the National Book Award medal of honor in the United States for her great contribution to the world of literature.