This is an automatically translated description

Violeta del Valle was born in 1920, a time when the Influenza and the war, followed by the Great Depression, changed human life forever, both around and far beyond her native country. Then the large family was forced to leave the usual spacious «house with camellias» and seek refuge in the rural wilderness, in the magical beauty of wildlife and the forgotten customs of kind and sincere people who forever changed both them and their perceptions of the world.

Isabel Allende's new novel is an insightful journey into the most unexpected nooks and crannies of the globe and the human soul, an epic tale for lovers of incredible life stories, from which you can create not a few short stories, but a great novel, like the writer's already filmed masterpiece «House of Spirits». Another thing is that in this story of one family, despite all the upheavals of the twentieth century that fell to their lot, despite the passion and whirlwind of indescribable emotions, there is still much less magic, and much more realism and humour.

«Dear Camille, you are the keeper of my letters, which record my whole life. But promise me one thing: after my death, you will burn them, because they are sentimental and often angry. This brief summary will replace that excessive correspondence," is the will of Violeta, the protagonist of Isabel Allende's novel of the same name, a woman of indomitable strength, intelligence, good humour and inexhaustible vitality. This "short story" is actually a family saga that echoes Allende's other novel, the epic House of Spirits.

Isabel Allende has said more than once that she writes from memory; and indeed: the great epic canvas that is her latest novel bears the distinct autobiographical imprint of its author - the suffocating, though seemingly prosperous, first marriage of Violeta, from which unexpected and passionate love, the death of her daughter, the trauma of exile, and peaceful love in her old age were the salvation.