Latest news with #MyNameIsEmiliadelValle
Los Angeles Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, May 18
1. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley: $29) Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of an heiress. 2. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 3. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 4. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 5. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead Books: $30) Worlds collide when a teenager vanishes from her Adirondacks summer camp. 6. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (Simon & Schuster: $29) A love triangle unearths dangerous secrets. 7. Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books: $28) An accomplished actor grapples with the varied roles she plays in her personal life. 8. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books: $29) As sea levels rise, a family on a remote island rescues a mysterious woman. 9. Silver Elite by Dani Francis (Del Rey: $33) Psychic gifts can get you killed in the first book of a dystopian romance series. 10. Strangers in Time by David Baldacci (Grand Central Publishing: $30) Two London teens scarred by World War II find an unexpected ally in a bereaved bookshop owner. … 1. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 2. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A call to renew a politics of plenty and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. 3. Life of Your Dreams by Mark Pentecost (Mission Driven Press: $28) The billionaire entrepreneur reveals the seven steps that took him from surviving to thriving. 4. The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad (Random House: $30) A guide to the art of journaling, with contributions from Jon Batiste, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem and others. 5. We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle (The Dial Press: $34) The guidebook for being alive. 6. Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf: $32) Diary entries from the famed writer's journal. 7. Joy Prescriptions by Dr. Tiffany Moon (Legacy Lit: $29) The doctor and 'Real Housewives' alum on how to find happiness. 8. Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Pantheon: $27) A meditation on freedom, trust, loss and our relationship with the natural world. 9. Conquering Crisis by Adm. William H. McRaven (Grand Central Publishing: $26) The retired four-star admiral's personal stories illustrate the principles of effective leadership during times of crisis. 10. The Prism by Laura Day (Spiegel & Grau: $32) Seven steps to self-discovery and renewal. … 1. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 2. Table for Two by Amor Towles (Penguin Books: $19) 3. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19) 4. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $19) 5. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 6. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (Grove Press: $22) 7. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 8. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 9. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17) 10. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Anchor: $18) … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 3. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $36) 4. Sociopath by Patric Gagne (Simon & Schuster: $20) 5. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 6. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 7. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 8. The Last of His Kind by Andy McCullough (Grand Central Publishing: $22) 9. The Best of Me by David Sedaris (Back Bay: $22) 10. The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin: $19)
The Star
11-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Isabel Allende's new novel binds threads of roots and destiny
A bloody civil war and the tragic death by suicide of an ousted president served as inspiration for Isabel Allende's new novel, My Name Is Emilia del Valle. The story centres on Emilia del Valle, a young Californian journalist who is dispatched to Chile to report on the confrontation between congressmen and those loyal to President Jose Manuel Balmaceda in 1891. 'I was always curious about that civil war,' Allende, 82, said in a video interview. 'More Chileans died there than in the four years of the war against Peru and Bolivia and they killed each other like beasts.' From her home in Belvedere, California, the Chilean-American writer said that Balmaceda's fate in Chile echoes that of her uncle, President Salvador Allende, in 1973; both were progressive leaders, faced fierce resistance from the right and Congress and died by suicide. Salvador Allende killed himself during Gen Augusto Pinochet's coup in 1973, which established a 17-year dictatorship and left more than 40,000 victims. To tell the story of Balmaceda in the book – available in English now – Allende was interested in a character who was neither a congressman nor a member of the government, so Emilia del Valle emerged, a curious and adventurous 25-year-old. Fluent in Spanish with Chilean roots from her biological father (born out of wedlock), Emilia travels to Chile to report on the war – but also to find her roots. 'Despite everything that happens to her, she falls in love with the country,' said Allende, who once again intertwines California and Chile in her narrative. 'It's very easy for me to write about Chile, even though I haven't lived there for so many years.' Allende's latest strong female protagonist is a journalist. Photo: AP On the battlefield, Emilia meets Angelita Ayalef, a Mapuche woman who is part of the so-called 'cantineras' (bartenders), women who followed the army to feed and cure soldiers, among other functions. 'When doing research for a book, what matters are the questions,' said Allende. 'Who were these women, the cantineras? History doesn't give them a voice, they don't have personality, there are no names, but they fulfilled a function equal to that of the soldier, and they died like soldiers.' 'Twice as much effort as any man' Growing up with an Irish Catholic mother and a stepfather of Mexican descent, Emilia is no stranger to religion and carries a Virgin of Guadalupe medal with her all the time. Emilia affectionately calls her stepfather Papo. 'It's a tribute to my own stepfather, I didn't know my father either, like Emilia, but I had a fantastic stepfather and so this is a tribute to him,' said Allende. With love but brutal honesty, Papo says to Emilia: 'Remember, princess, that you will have to make twice as much effort as any man to get half the recognition.' Being a woman, has Allende ever faced this? The author recalled sending her newly completed manuscript of The House Of The Spirits to Carmen Balcells, the renowned Barcelona literary agent who championed the so-called 'boom,' or new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s. Allende recalls Balcells' blunt assessment: ''This is a good novel, and I'll publish it, but that doesn't mean you're a writer. And as a woman, you're going to have to make twice as much effort as any man'. And that was the bible, because that has been my life, twice the effort to get respect, recognition for the work I do.' Balcells is present in another way in the novel as an inspiration for the character of Paulina del Valle, a successful, autonomous and brutally direct businesswoman who is the aunt of Emilia and introduces her to Chilean high society. Author Isabel Allende poses at her writing studio in Sausalito, California. Photo: AP Paulina also appears in Allende's Daughter Of Fortune (1999) and Portrait In Sepia (2000). 'When Carmen read the manuscripts (of those novels) she told me 'this is me!' she recognised herself immediately,' said Allende. Balcells passed away in 2015. Through Emilia's eyes, Allende immerses the reader in the brutal realities of the hand-to-hand war, the cannon fires and the repression against Balmaceda's followers. 'The battles of that time were hand-to-hand, face-to-face, but fewer people died than die now, because they were killed one by one, they were not killed en masse as they are killed now,' she said. 'Today, someone in Texas pushes a button and a bomb explodes in Iraq, and it doesn't matter how many people die, they are just numbers.' Allende dedicates the book to her brother Juan, who helped her with the historical research of the novel. Recovering the lost memory Although Allende is not religious, she lamented the death of Pope Francis, whom she described as a 'wonderful, simple, humble, intelligent man.' 'I adored him, not because he was pope, but because he went to revolutionise a church that was already completely old,' she said. She also mourned the death of Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, whose passing sparked mixed reactions between those who celebrated him for his literary work and those who criticised his political positions, especially in his last years. 'The legacy is immortal, and I think that within literature he is a very important character,' said Allende. 'His political position, that is another story, but what remains is not his political position, what remains is the work.' Allende said that she has not seen the upcoming The House Of The Spirits Prime Video series so she said it will be a complete surprise for her. What she does know is that her next book will be another memoir, done with the help of the extensive collection of daily letters she sent daily to her mother since she turned 16. 'Writing a memoir is much harder than a novel,' she said. 'It turns out I have forgotten 90% of what has happened to me and the 10% that I remember did not happen like that. But then when I see the letters, day by day, I recover the lost memory and I recover the emotion of the moment.' Allende is grateful to be able to continue doing what she loves most: 'My head still works, as long as I can pay attention, remember, not repeat myself, I will be able to continue writing, but there will come a day when it will not be possible.' – AP
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From Isabel Allende to Tim Wigmore: new books reviewed in short
Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer, translated by Eleanor Updegraff Astute observations on the absurd theatre of aspirational living in the age of social media abound in Teresa Präauer's Cooking in the Wrong Century. Translated by Eleanor Updegraff, the novel tells of a dinner party, but is fractured by vignettes of past and present, recipes and a jazz playlist. Our hostess, as she is only ever known, attentively folds linen napkins hoping to orchestrate an effortless charm offensive. But her guests arrive late and tipsy, exposing both the delicate fiction of taste, class, and curated identity as well as just how easily a cultivated cool can peel at the edges. There's wit here, but also melancholy: a woman in her forties trying to pin herself to a world where the rules of cultural capital are constantly shifting. Präauer skewers performativity adroitly, revealing how objects – a Danish dishtowel; a star chef's cookbook – are less about utility and more about belonging. The real subject, perhaps, is taste: how we acquire it, display it, and ultimately suffer for it. Culture, under Präauer's gaze, is a mood that can be blurred by candlelight and the Thelonious Monk Septet: it's irresistible, disorienting, and slightly out of reach. By Zoë Huxford Pushkin Press, 176pp, £14.99. Buy the book My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende Set on the cusp of the Chilean Civil War in 1891, and told in the author's familiar memoir-style prose, Isabel Allende's 28th book, My Name Is Emilia del Valle, introduces the newest member of the Del Valle clan. Emilia, the illegitimate daughter of Chilean aristocrat Gonzalo Andrés del Valle (whom some may recall from brief mentions in previous books) and Irish novice nun Molly Walsh, subverts the rigid social norms and becomes a journalist in San Francisco. Her work at the Daily Examiner appears under a male pseudonym. It is only while documenting the civil war that she convinces her editor to publish her writing under her given name. Seamlessly blending history with fiction, Allende vividly brings to life one of the most gruesome parts of 19th-century Chile's history and its lasting impact. Full of comedic characters – some readers will come across them for the first time; others will be reintroduced to them – and whirlwind romances, the novel provides social commentary on the life of women, the class system and the cultural differences between California and Chile. My Name Is Emilia del Valle is the perfect addition to the Del Valle literary universe. By Zuzanna Lachendro Bloomsbury, 304pp, £18.99. Buy the book The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston The 17th-century Dutch lost their minds and their fortunes to tulips; for Victorian Britons it was orchids that were the bloom of obsession. As the empire reached its apogee, these plants made their way back from the furthest corners of the globe and 'orchidelirium' affected everyone from the Queen and botanists to the well-to-do, old money or new – a single rare plant could cost as much as £95,000 in today's money. To service this demand, a cadre of plant hunters scoured the tropics, at great personal danger, for unknown varieties. Sarah Bilston's book is about the 1891 expedition that set out to find a near-mythical example, a purple and crimson flower – Cattleya labiata – that grew deep in the Brazilian rainforest. Her cast includes the Swedish plant hunter Claes Ericsson, the nurseryman Frederick Sander who sponsored him, and Erich Bungeroth, a rival in the quest. The story sometimes has the trappings of a chase thriller but Bilston is assiduous in revealing that behind the expedition lay a host of other forces: from colonialism, commerce and communication, and the hold plants had on the imagination of writers, all the way to Darwin and the scientific revolution. By Michael Prodger Harvard University Press, 400pp, £29.95. Buy the book Test Cricket: A History by Tim Wigmore 'Cricket more than any other game is inclined towards sentimentalism.' So wrote one dolorous scribbler in the early-20th century, and the Test (now standardised at two innings over five days, played in whites) is the most romanticised of all the sport's forms. The journalist Tim Wigmore has written what the book's publisher slightly tendentiously calls 'the first narrative history of the Test'. He captures all the great stories in Test history – the Bodyline series, West Indies in the 1980s, etc – and all the great names with a great eye for fascinating details and the bizarre serendipities of history. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Wigmore struggles with the 'arbitrary' definition of Test match, which is no shade on him, as many of the game's institutions themselves contest what counts as first-class or international matches – three days, five days, limitless? Two innings, one? He's particularly good on the importance of the empire to cricket's spread across the world, but also how it limited the sport's popularity – racism certainly, and the early restriction of Test-match status to countries within the Commonwealth. Fortunately, Wigmore manages to keep the romance out of the bog of sentimentality. By Barney Horner Quercus Books, 592pp, £30. Buy the book [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
Washington Post
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Isabel Allende's new novel sends an adventurous reporter to war
Isabel Allende often finds thematic inspiration in her lived experience of revolution. She fled political persecution in Chile after a coup in 1973 deposed President Salvador Allende, her father's cousin. While in exile in Venezuela, she achieved renewal and personal liberation through professional success. She published her critically acclaimed best-selling debut, 'The House of the Spirits,' in 1982. Her new novel, 'My Name Is Emilia del Valle,' returns to her childhood home of Chile, though the story begins in San Francisco's Mission District in 1866. Here, an Irish nun finds sanctuary after a failed love affair with a Chilean aristocrat. Taken in by a local teacher, whom she marries, she gives birth to a daughter she names Emilia. The girl is raised by her mother and stepfather to think for herself and find meaningful work, and Emilia ends up making a living by writing popular pulp fiction and a column for the San Francisco Daily Examiner under the pen name Brandon J. Price. Emilia and her family 'spent hours coming up with the most macho name we could think of,' she explains. When civil war breaks out in Chile in 1891, Emilia seizes the chance to cover the revolution and find her birth father. Along with another reporter from the Examiner, she travels to Chile, begins an affair with her colleague, meets her estranged father and embeds with government forces supporting Chilean President José Manuel Balmaceda, an autocrat dressed as a reformer. She's got a gut feeling about Balmaceda's claims that his reforms will benefit everyone in Chile, that 'Balmaceda was fighting for the rights of the common man, trying to break the iron grip of the aristocracy. And yet I had heard that he did so with a shocking brutality.' She's determined to report whether the rumors are true. Emilia is soon caught up in Balmaceda's paradox. Her fraught journey of romance and self-discovery pivots desperately to survival when Balmaceda's army is defeated. The 1891 civil war in Chile was described by military historian Lt. Col. Don P. Wyckoff as a 'unique civil war — a navy without an army opposing an army without a navy — an elephant in conflict with a whale.' Emilia's journalism is part and parcel of the story's narrative. We learn, as her readers do, that Balmaceda's reform policies are quickly opposed not only by his political enemies, but also by his own ministers. The root of the conflict was fiscal policy: Balmaceda wanted to eliminate domestic tax revenue and fund his reform programs with duties collected from British mining companies. And when he moved to do so without congressional approval, a constitutional crisis quickly devolved into violent confrontation, with the Chilean Navy supporting the congressional rebels and Balmaceda commanding the army. Emilia's reports from the battlefield offer a stark counterpoint to the policy debates over taxes and tariffs. She sees it as her job 'to collect the dispersed fragments' of stories for thousands of men who would die on the battlefield and never get to tell theirs. 'It is impossible to describe the horror of war,' she writes. 'How is it possible that, from the dawn of their presence on earth, men have systematically set out to murder one another? What fatal madness do we carry in our soul? That propensity toward destruction is the original sin.' Allende offers readers a deeply researched historical adventure, excavating both romantic and journalistic exploits with verve and passion. But it is the story's prescient alignment with our current cultural and civic upheaval that lands like a mortar from Allende's epic depiction of the Battle of Concón. The United States is in a paroxysm of tariff-induced economic crisis, market collapse, frenzied political stasis, and battles for institutional power and control over individual citizens, native and foreign. From that vantage, Chile's history (including the role of foreign interests) and Emilia's story offer an essential lesson. If history and a free press illuminate a revolution's explosion of civil norms, literature reveals the human triumph, vanity and tragedy of revolution's impact. The upheaval that Emilia del Valle recounts in 1891 is our clarion call in 2025. Marcela Davison Avilés is a multimedia producer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. By Isabel Allende Ballantine. 304 pp. $30
New York Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Interview': Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society
At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world's most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That's a lot of books. Allende's newest novel, 'My Name Is Emilia del Valle,' will be published May 6, and it's about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende's work, it's a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it's not that far off from Allende's own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31, raising two small children and working as a journalist, her life was upended forever. That year a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her father's cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote 'The House of the Spirits,' which evolved from a letter she had begun writing to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway best seller and it remains one of her best-known. Allende moved to the United States in the late 1980s, where she has been writing steadily ever since. But as she told me, she has never stopped longing for and thinking about her past — whether that's her home country, her ancestors or her daughter who died young. After speaking to her, I think I understand why. Video The beloved author left Chile at a time of great turmoil and has longed for the nation of her youth ever since. The main character in your new book, Emilia, doesn't have a relationship with her birth father. She goes looking for him. I know you didn't have a relationship with your birth father. I'm curious about how your mother talked about your father when you were young and how you thought about him. She never spoke about him. All the photographs in which he appeared were destroyed, and there was never a mention of his name. When we asked, she would always say, 'He was a very intelligent man.' That's it. She wouldn't say why he left, why we couldn't see him, no explanation. At some point, when they were teenagers, my brothers wanted to meet him, and it was a big disappointment for them because my father had absolutely no connection with them and no interest in them, but I never looked for him. Many years later, when I was working as a journalist, I was called to the morgue to identify the body of a man that had died in the street. And I couldn't identify him because I had never seen a picture of him. That was my father. First of all, that sounds terrible. No, it wasn't terrible. I mean, it was terrible to see a corpse for the first time, but I didn't feel anything, any connection, any compassion, any longing of any kind. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
