The Wind Knows My Name
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4.3 • 49 Ratings
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
THE POWERFUL AND MOVING NEW NOVEL FROM LITERARY LEGEND ISABEL ALLENDE
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR
'A grand storyteller' - KHALED HOSSEINI
'A new novel by Isabel Allende is always a treat' - DAILY MAIL
'What a joy it must be to come upon Allende for the first time' - COLUM MCCANN
No, we're not lost.
The wind knows my name.
And yours too.
Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht - the night their family loses everything. As her child's safety seems ever harder to guarantee, Samuel's mother secures a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.
Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes her tenuous reality through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination. Meanwhile, Selena Duran, a young social worker, enlists the help of a successful lawyer in hopes of tracking down Anita's mother.
Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make, and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers - and never stop dreaming.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
What connects a boy fleeing the Nazis on the Kindertransport with a girl born almost a century later in El Salvador? Isabel Allende’s continent-sweeping and decades-spanning novel draws these threads, and many more, together in her typically deft and skilful style. It’s a tale that is part romance, part fierce call for justice and part desperate plea for empathy, all fuelled by Allende’s clear sense of moral duty and her fury at the violence consistently unleashed on the vulnerable across all kinds of societies. Her gift for bringing to life improbably dramatic and passionate characters and sweeping you thrillingly along with them remains undiminished, while the broad scope of the overall story never obstructs the quieter moments of intimacy. This is a work that plunges the depths of heartbreak and despair, but the lasting impression is of love’s steadfastness in the face of impossible cruelty, and an insistence that it is never too late for action.
Customer Reviews
A meaningful title
And an equally profound content. I liked this book for the unusual way to tell a story which manages to liaise so many different elements: social issues, difficult political choices, children abuse, history of distant cultures and the unexplainable, the beliefs, the magic. And most of all, a very personal style.