[LESS INFO] 22 VIEWS | ADDED 09:24:34 04/23/07
The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende has sold 15 million books in 30 languages over the past two decades. Few living writers receive the critical acclaim, popular following and consistent record of bestselling works that she has enjoyed since the publication of her first and best-known novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1982. Forced into exile after the overthrow and death of her uncle, President Salvador Allende, in the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile in 1973, she became a novelist, known particularly for her storytelling and her passionate exploration of the human condition. Isabel Allende travels from San Francisco, where she now lives, back to Chile, the homeland she left in 1975. Melvyn Bragg meets her in Chile's capital, Santiago, and there explores her relationship with her homeland, the effect her upbringing and exile has had on her writing, her feelings about the Pinochet years in Chile now that the dictator has died, and how she finds it impossible to tell a story without embellishing the truth!