Portrait in Sepia – Isabel Allende

Allende tackles her homeland head-on in this staggering, epic romance.

Portrait in Sepia is both a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile and a marvellous family saga peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits, two of Allende’s most celebrated novels.

As a young girl, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that has shaped her character and erased 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 terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life.

Richly detailed, epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.