City of the Beasts - Isabel Allende

Kingdom of the Golden Dragon - Isabel Allende

This is only the second or third Isabel Allende book that I ve read and it was not what I expected at all. Style As usual, the writing style is typically South American (if you have read any Garcia Marquez you will know what I mean) with flowery and ornate phrases and lyrical descriptions. The descriptions of the scenery of the Himalayas, where most of the story is set, were beautiful and made me want to visit that area. Plot The novel features three main characters, Alex Cold, his friend Nadia and his grandmother Kate. The bad guys are the Collector, who is ultra-rich and can buy almost anything he wants, and the Specialist, a sort of all-purpose hit man and ...

Isabel Allende in general

Chillean writer Isabel Allende is perhaps one of the most captivating and riveting writers today. A genius in magical realism, her work is fantastical, and touchingly human, mixing the folklore of traditional peoples with the horror of tyranical regiems. House of the Spirits - this is a wonderful text following three generations of women - Clara, Alba and Blanca - their loves, men and struggle for survival under a troubling regiem is brought to life with much vigour and a keen sense of wonder. Eva Luna - the tale of a girl born in a house full of mummies, who uses papier mache to rescue political prisonners.... in many ways the most fantastical of Allende's novels - ...

Daughter of Fortune - Isabel Allende

This is a wonderful tale of adventure, love, loss and self-discovery, set in the nineteenth century. Its heroine is Eliza, a girl left as a baby to the care of an English family in the city of Valparaiso, Chile. Her benefactors, the Sommers, have their own secrets and eccentricities: Rose, who adopts her, has vowed at twenty not to marry. In twenty years, the young Eliza crosses the world in a life of hardships and marvels. Constantly through the book we meet characters outcast or fugitive from their own societies, each with dark pasts or tragedies. Rose Sommers conceals a past that forced her to leave England, along with her reserved brother, to found a household in Chile. Their ...