Eva Luna
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3.9 • 16 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
**The remarkable novel from the multi-million-bestselling author of The House of the Spirits and The Japanese Lover**
Meet the unforgettable Eva Luna: a lover, a writer, a revolutionary and above all, a storyteller.
Eva Luna is the daughter of a professor's assistant and a snake-bitten gardener – born poor, orphaned at an early age and working as a servant. Eva is a naturally gifted and imaginative storyteller who meets people from all walks of life. Though she has no wealth, she trades her stories like currency with people who are kind to her. As she shares her stories, she introduces an eccentric cast of characters: the Lebanese émigré who takes her in, her Catholic godmother who believes in saints, a street urchin who grows up to be the leader of the guerrilla struggle, a celebrated trans cabaret star and a young refugee whose flight from postwar Europe will change Eva's life forever.
As Eva tells her story, Isabel Allende brings to life a complex South American country – the rich, the poor, the sophisticated – in a novel that celebrates the power of imagination and storytelling.
Praise for Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna:
‘Vibrant, colourful characters; the ordinary fused with the grotesque; a Latin American setting, tropical this time; vivid, elegant narrative. The narrator, Eva Luna, is herself a story-teller in the Allende tradition’ Guardian
‘An evident affection for words, compassion for the oppressed and the inarticulate, the daring ambition to draw cross-sections of whole societies . . . Allende's work glows’ New York Times
‘Sumptuous . . . a tale that spans forty years and moves from a surreal jungle to a modern-day urban capital where even the most apolitical are driven to risky anti-government activities’ Chicago Tribune
‘Allende rearranges reality with a blend of memories, mysticism and imagination’ The Philadelphia Inquirer
‘A remarkable novel, one in which a cascade of stories tumbled out before the reader, stories vivid and passionate and human’ Washington Post
‘Magnificent . . . Allende is a prodigious fabulist, weaving extraordinary tales’ Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman makes love to an Indian dying of snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva``so she will love life.'' Thus begins Allende's latest novel, a magnificent successor to The House of the Spirits and Of Love & Shadows. Set in a Latin American country, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures. Brought up in the house of an eccentric doctor devoted to mummifying corpses, where her mother is a servant, Eva is left an orphan at six. Her black godmother, or madrina , leases her as a servant to a series of bizarre households of metaphorical significance, the last of which she leaves in grand style upon emptying a government Minister's chamberpot over his head. Interleaved with Eva's story is her account of a certain Rolf Carle, with whom her life will become linkedshe tells of his youth in Nazi Austria and young manhood as a filmmaker in South America. Through a series of improbable and felicitous coincidences, Eva is taken under the wing of such exotic benefactors as a street urchin who becomes a guerrilla leader, a colorful whorehouse Madam, a kindly Turkish merchant and a stunningly beautiful transsexual. Like the author, Eva is a prodigious fabulist, weaving extraordinary tales that change reality at will, making it, as she says, easier to bear. Although the fabulist's art is seen as dangerously escapist, Allende's wonderful novel, crammed with the strange and fantastical, the sensuous and the erotic, also speaks powerfully in the cause of freedom. 40,000 first printing; BOMC and QPBC alternate.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful
Another Isabel Allende book populated with enchanting characters with a rich and diverse history.
A feast
Would I ever dare to evaluate my first Allende book? A true
Wordsmith and Weaver of yarns.
Life experience and research to fill in the gaps. My head is full of her people in their individual contexts.
Just the right amount of detail that doesn’t detract from the progression.
Thank you. I am a fan.