Portrait in Sepia - Softcover

Allende, Isabel

4.01

39,507 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060898488 ISBN 13: 9780060898489

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2013

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"Portrait in Sepia is the best book Allende has published in the United States since her first novel of nearly two decades ago, The House of the Spirits."
--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Portrait in Sepia tightens the weave of a multigenerational fantasy as complete and inspiring as the real world it parallels ... Allende's enchanting historical universe keeps expanding and Portrait in Sepia is a new galactic jewel."
--Chicago Tribune

A sequel to Daughter of Fortune, New York Times bestselling author, Isabel Allende, continues her magic with this spellbinding family saga set against war and economic hardship.

Aurora del Valle suffers a brutal trauma that erases from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by horrible nightmares. When she is forced to recognize her betrayal at the hands of the man she loves, and to cope with the resulting solitude, she decides to explore the mystery of her past.

Portrait in Sepia is an extraordinary achievement: richly detailed, epic in scope, intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.

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Review:

Isabel Allende has established herself as one of the most consummate of all modern storytellers, a reputation that is confirmed in her novel Portrait in Sepia. Allende offers a compelling saga of the turbulent history, lives and loves of late 19th-century Chile, drawing on characters from her earlier novels, The House of Spirits and Daughter of Fortune.

The book's heroine is Aurora del Valle, who "came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco". As Aurora sets out to retell her own history and that of her family, she admits "there are so many secrets in my family that I may never have time to unveil them all: truth is short-lived, watered down by torrents of rain". In typical Allende fashion, Portrait in Sepia is crammed with love, desire, tragedy and dark family secrets, all played out against the dramatic backdrop of revolutionary Chile. Aurora's mother is a Chilean-Chinese beauty, whilst her father is a dissolute scion of the wealthy and powerful del Valle family. At the heart of Aurora's slow, painful recreation of her childhood towers one of Allende's greatest fictional creations, the heroine's grandmother, Paulina del Valle. An "astute, bewigged Amazon with a gluttonous appetite", Paulina holds both the del Valle family and Allende's novel together, as she presides over Aurora's adolescence in a haze of pastries, taffeta and overweening love.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is Allende's decision to turn her heroine into a photographer, bringing together the written word and the photograph as a way of holding onto the past: "through photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past". There is little confusion in Allende's elegantly crafted and hugely enjoyable novel. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"Rich and complex ... Allende exercises her supreme storytelling abilities ... a grand installment in an already impressive repertoire."--Publishers Weekly (* Starred Review *)

"Complex, intriguing, ambitious ... it's Allende's remarkable flair for character that makes it all come alive."--Kirkus

"Portrait in Sepia is rich with color and emotion and packed with intriguing characters."--San Francisco Chronicle

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