In the year 1704, dairy maid Elen Griffiths' immunity to the smallpox plaguing England should be a blessing.
But it
...Antoinette's world has fallen apart: her husb&, the man she has loved for as long as she can remember, has died tragically in
...A brilliant memoir from the celebrated Chilean novelist on friends, family & life in California, her adopted home. Isabel Allende has sold more than 50 million copies of her books worldwide. The most beloved & successful of her books, ' The House of the Spirits', was based on her Chilean childhood, & other autobiographical works include the deeply moving ' Paula' -- a family history written at the bedside of her daughter while she lay in a coma -- & the fascinating ' My Invented Country', which explored the events of her native Chile where she lived until Pinochet's military coup. Now, in ' The Sum of the Days', we have Isabel describe in an exceptionally vivid, human & deeply personal way her life in California where she has lived for more than 25 years. The first page picks up from where Paula ends -- her daughter never did wake up from her coma & died in 1992 -- when Allende recounts spreading Paula's ashes in her favourite part of the woods by their home. It is fair to say that Isabel has never recovered from losing her daughter but has managed to survive by keeping her husb&, son, grandchildren as well as close friends -- kindred spirits -- central to her life. The book is particularly illuminating & revealing about her working life -- she must begin every new book she writes on January 8th or else abandon it for a year. ' The Sum of the Days', based on Allende's own journals & daily correspondence with her mother in Chile, reveals the author to be a dazzling, generous, warm & hysterically funny matriarch within her swirl of family & friends.