The average reader may choose the novel for its exploration of human relationships, but will also learn about the Spanish Civil War and the coup d’etat in Chile in 1973. Allende educates while entertaining her audience. Allende begins each chapter with a quote from his work. Neruda (1904-1973) also had a career in the Chilean diplomatic corps, culminating with the ambassadorship to Paris. The title, A Long Petal of the Sea, is Pablo Neruda’s description of his native land in one of his poems. The characters are fictional, inspired by people I’ve know… The book wrote itself, as if it had been dictated to me.” “This is a novel but the events and historical individuals are real. “It is only now… that I can tell ,” writes Isabel Allende in her acknowledgements. In Venezuela, Isabel and Pey met, and he told her about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and on the Chile-bound refugee ship, the Winnipeg. He and many other Chileans including Isabel Allende, her first husband and her two children, sought asylum in Venezuela after the military coup of 1973.

He became an advisor to Salvador Allende’s popular front government. One of her major sources for this novel was Victor Pey, (1915-2018) an engineer who came from Spain as a refugee to Chile in 1939. Isabel Allende, who now lives in California, spent her youth in Chile. Her latest, A Long Petal of the Sea is an historical novel, a tour de force which takes readers through two struggles for democracy and social equality: that of the popular front government elected in Spain in 1931, and that of the Salvador Allende administration in Chile, 1970-73. In the almost forty years since, she has written twenty-four books which have become international best sellers. Isabel Allende’s first novel, House of the Spirits, was published in 1982 and won critical and popular acclaim.

Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson

A long petal by the sea