Isabel Angelica Allende Liona is a Chilean-American writer.

Her works sometimes contain aspects of the magical realism genre. She is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts which have been commercially successful.

She has been called "the world's most widely-read Spanish-language author".

Her novels are often based upon her personal experience and historical events and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism.

She was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros called Dona Panchita and Tomas Allende, who at the time was a second secretary at the Chilean embassy.

Her father Tomas was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973.

In 1945, after Tomas left them, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago, Chile, where they lived until 1953. In 1953 Allende's mother married Ramon Huidobro and the family moved often. He was a diplomat appointed to Bolivia and Beirut.

In La Paz, Bolivia, Isabel attended an American private school and in Beirut she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile where Isabel was briefly home-schooled. In her youth Isabel read widely particularly the works of William Shakespeare.

In 1970, Salvador Allende appointed Huidobro as Ambassador to Argentina.

Before writing books, Isabel worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in Santiago, then in Brussels and elsewhere in Europe from 1959 to 1965.

For a short time in Chile Isabel also had a job translating romance novels from English to Spanish. However, she was sacked for making unauthorised changes to the dialogue of the heroines to make them sound more intelligent. She also altered the Cinderella ending to give the heroines greater independence and a chance to make a positive impact in the world.

In 1973, Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Isabel found herself arranging safe passage for people on the "wanted lists", which she continued to do until her mother and stepfather narrowly escaped assassination.

When she herself was added to the list and began receiving death threats, she fled to Venezuela, where she stayed for 13 years.

It was during this time that she wrote her debut novel The House of the Spirits (1982). She has said that her move from Chile made her a serious writer: "I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be."

She believed that, being female in a patriarchal family, she was not expected to be a "liberated" person. Her history of oppression and liberation is thematically found in much of her fiction, where women contest the ideals of patriarchal leaders. In Venezuela she was a columnist for El Nacional, a major national newspaper.

Beginning in 1967, she was on the editorial staff of Paula magazine and the children's magazine Mampato from 1969 to 1974, where she later became the editor. She published two children's stories, La Abuela Panchita and Lauchas y Lauchones as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita. She also worked in Chilean television production channels 7 and 13 from 1970 to 1974.

As a journalist, she once sought an interview with poet Pablo Neruda who agreed to be interviewed and told her she had too much imagination to be a journalist and should be a novelist instead.

He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form. She did so and this became her first published book. 

In 1973, her play El Ambajador played in Santiago a few months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.

During her time in Venezuela, she was a freelance journalist for El Nacional in Caracas from 1976 to 1993.

In 1977, while in Caracas, she received a phone call informing her that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death. She sat down to write him a letter, hoping to thereby "keep him alive, at least in spirit".

The letter evolved into a book, The House of the Spirits. This work was intended to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. The book was rejected by numerous Latin American publishers but eventually was published in Barcelona. The book soon ran to more than two dozen editions in Spanish and was translated into a score of languages.

She was compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an author in the style known as magical realism.

Her book Paula (1995) is a memoir of her childhood in Santiago and the years she spent in exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter Paula. 

In 1991 an error in Paula's medication resulted in severe brain damage, leaving her in a persistent vegetative state.

Allende spent months at Paula's bedside before learning that it was a hospital mishap that caused the brain damage. She had her daughter moved to a hospital in California where she died on 6 December 1992.

Allende's novels have been translated into more than 42 languages and sold more than 77 million copies.

Her 2008 book The Sum of Our Days focuses on her life with her family, including her grown up son Nicolas, her second husband, William Gordon and several grandchildren.

A novel set in New Orleans, Island Beneath the Sea, was published in 2010.

In 2011 came El Cuaderno de Maya in which the setting alternates between Berkeley, California and Chiloe in Chile as well as Las Vegas, Nevada.

The book I am reviewing today is her 20th. It is a historical fiction novel that follows a courageous young woman raised in San Francisco during the post-Gold Rush years.

She becomes a pioneering journalist and travels to Chile during the 1981 civil war to report on the conflict and uncover the truth about her wealthy estranged father.

The novel covers themes of self-discovery, war, class divides and social justice, often incorporating Allende's signature blend of historical reality and personal, emotional journeys.

The novel opens in post-Gold Rush San Francisco, where Molly Walsh, daughter of Irish immigrants and a devout Catholic, bears the child of the wealthy Gonzalo Andres del Valle (whose family amassed a fortune in the California Gold Rush) after a torrid fling.

That child is Emilia, raised by her strong-willed mother and kind stepfather, the mestizo scholar-teacher, Don Pancho.

Emilia is raised in a humble house in the Mission speaking English and Spanish. She is encouraged to read, write and be curious about the world around her, but with her mother's Catholic capacity for generosity and service.

Without pressure from her parents to marry and bear children, Emilia develops a skill for writing. She first pens successful dime novels under a male pseudonym before taking that name and using it as a way into the journalistic sphere at the San Francisco Examiner.

It isn't long before the Examiner gives Emilia the opportunity to travel to Chile to cover the brewing tension between the President and the Congress that have Chile primed for civil war. She'll be sent to Chile with her colleague Eric Whelan - for it is unheard of to send a woman journalist to a foreign country to cover politics and bloodshed - but with the unprecedented permission to write under her given name.

With her family's approval, especially that of her mother, who has never concealed the truth about Emilia's father and his country of origin, Emilia departs for Chile to write important stories and discover her heritage.

While Emilia learns much of her birth father and the aristocratic del Valle family, she is also confronted by the brutal, violent realities of war.