My Invented Country: A Memoir

The life story of Isabel Allende – one of the world’s favourite writers – is as exotic, passionate and inspiring as one of her novels. ‘The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do.’ Just three when her parents divorced, Isabel Allende was raised in her grandparents' home in Chile. She left school at sixteen; and married Miguel Frías at nineteen. She then juggled her work as a journalist, editor, advice columnist and television interviewer with looking after her two children. But when her cousin the Chilean president Salvador Allende was assassinated in 1973 in Pinochet's right-wing military coup, her life changed profoundly. It was too dangerous to stay in Chile; so she, her husband and their two children fled to Venezuela. During her impoverished exile, she started writing ‘The House of the Spirits’. Based on her memories of her family and the political upheaval in her native country, it became an international bestseller and everything changed again… ‘Paula’, Allende’s book written to her dying daughter detailing the developments of her emotional life has sold 150,000 in B format paperback alone. ‘My Invented Country’ will tie these experiences into a larger political and geographical framework, making her life at once exotic and comprehensible, its events at once historical and immediate.

About the Author :
Isabel Allende was born in 1942, and is the niece of Salvador Allende, who went on to become famous as the elected President of Chile deposed in a CIA-backed coup. She worked as a journalist, playwright and children’s writer in Chile until 1974 and then in Venezuela until 1984. Her first novel for adults, ‘The House of the Spirits’, was published in Spanish in 1982, beginning life as a letter to her dying grandfather. It was an international sensation, and ever since all her books have been acclaimed and adored in numberless translations worldwide.

Review :
‘Allende’s writing is so vivid we smell the countryside, hear the sounds, see the bright birds, the scorched earth, smell and even taste the soft fruit.’ The Times ‘Allende has a gift for conversational writing and a sharp sense of humour…I very much enjoyed this visit to the other Chile, that half-remembered country of her imagination.’ New Statesman ‘Allende is incapable of telling a bad story. She writes of her own experience with a kind of wild candour. Her heroically sustained narrative, her lovingly prepared plots and surprise inventions explode in an exaltation.’ Independent ‘Lucid, original and expounded with an unquestionable sense of humor…part essay and part autobiography…When Allende poses sweeping general truths, she leaves room for argument…But the book gets my undivided attention when it expounds on the relationship of the author to that country of hers, invented, imaginary, fictional, to the story of her family, which is itself invented memory, and to her vocation as a narrator… It will provoke curiosity. And that is where everything begins.’ LA Times