Isabel Allende
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After the death of her beloved grandfather, nineteen-year-old Maya Vidal, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crimes, becomes trapped in a war between assassins, the police, the FBI, and Interpol, until her grandmother helps her escape to the remote island of Chiloé, off coast of Chile where she tries to make sense of her life. Maya, a young American on the run records in her diary her adjustment to a new country, her drug problems, her romantic...
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"In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life irreversibly intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage...
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Hopkinton Like Kristin Hannah
Montague - Kate's Picks
MWCC 2025 Reading Challenge: August
Webster - Latinx Titles
Montague - Kate's Picks
MWCC 2025 Reading Challenge: August
Webster - Latinx Titles
Description
"This sweeping novel from the New York times bestselling author of 'A Long Petal of the Sea' tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher
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Raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, English orphan Eliza Sommers meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk with ambitious dreams. When gold is discovered in the hills of northern California, Chileans, including Joaquín, head north to seek their fortune. Eliza, pregnant with Joaquín's child, leaves behind everything she knows to follow her lover. In the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco,...
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"From New York Times and internationally bestselling author Isabel Allende, an exquisitely crafted love story and multigenerational epic that sweeps from San Francisco in the present-day to Poland and the United States during the Second World War. In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of...
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The Jackson women, Indiana and Amanda, have always had each other. Yet, while their bond is strong, mother and daughter are as different as night and day. Indiana, a beautiful holistic healer, is a free-spirited bohemian, who looks for the good in people. Amanda is fascinated by the dark side of human nature, like her father, the SFPD's Deputy Chief of Homicide. She is addicted to crime novels and Ripper, the online mystery game she plays. When a...
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The daughter of an African mother she never knew and a white sailor, Zarit - known as Tt - was born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue. Growing up amid brutality and fear, Tt found solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the mysteries of voodoo. Her life changes when twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 to run his father's plantation, Saint Lazare. Overwhelmed by the challenges of his responsibilities...
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"This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019. Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht--the night their family lost everything. Samuel's mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport...
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Pepperell - Winter Reads
Springfield - Winter Themed Books - Winter Reading Challenge 2025
Webster - Latinx Titles
Springfield - Winter Themed Books - Winter Reading Challenge 2025
Webster - Latinx Titles
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"In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident--which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster--a 60-year-old human rights scholar--hits the car of Evelyn Ortega--a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala--in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen and...
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"Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul as she shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory--and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded,...
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Completing the trilogy that includes her bestselling novels Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits, Portrait in Sepia is a stunning novel about memory and family secrets
Set at the end of the nineteenth century, Portrait in Sepia is a richly imagined historical novel featuring the colorful and intrepid del Valle family.
The protagonist, Aurora del Valle, suffers a brutal trauma that shapes her character and erases from her mind all recollections...
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The story weaves a vivid and engrossing tale of one man's search for love and his struggle to come to terms with a childhood of poverty and neglect. As he journeys from the Hispanic barrio in Los Angeles to the killing fields of Vietnam to the frenetic life of a lawyer in San Francisco, Gregory Reeves loses himself in an illusory and wrongheaded quest. Only when he circles back to his roots does he find the love and acceptance he has been looking...
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"An intoxicating collection of short fiction by one of the most beloved writers of our time. Eva Luna is a young woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Lying in bed with her European lover, refugee and journalist Rolf Carle;, Eva answers his request for a story "you have never told anyone before" with these twenty-three samples of her vibrant artistry. Interweaving the real and the magical, she explores love, vengeance,...
14) Paula
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Newly Reissued
New York Times Bestselling Author
When Isabel Allende's daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and fell into a coma, the author began to write the story of her family for her unconscious child. In the telling, bizarre ancestors appear before our eyes; we hear both delightful and bitter childhood memories, amazing anecdotes of youthful years, the most intimate secrets passed along in whispers. With Paula, Allende has written a powerful...
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Everyman's library (Alfred A. Knopf Inc.) volume 281
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MWCC 2025 Reading Challenge: June
MWCC Read a Banned/Challenged Book
Pepperell - June 2025 Reading Challenge
MWCC Read a Banned/Challenged Book
Pepperell - June 2025 Reading Challenge
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"The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their...
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"In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of seventeen, she begins to publish pulp fiction using a man's pen name. When these fictional worlds...
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A highly personal memoir of exile and homeland by bestselling author Isabel Allende
In My Invented Country Isabel Allende evokes the magnificent landscapes of her country, a charming, idiosyncratic Chilean people with a violent history and indomitable spirit, and the politics, religion, myth and magic of her homeland that she carries with her even today.
The book circles around two life-changing moments. The assassination of her uncle, Salvador Allende...