The Sum of Our Days (Hardcover)

A brilliant memoir from the celebrated Chilean novelist on friends, family and life in California, her adopted home.

The first page picks up from where Paula ends - her daughter never did wake up from her coma and died in 1992 - when Allende recounts spreading Paula's ashes in her favourite part of the woods by their home. It is fair to say that Isabel has never recovered from losing her daughter but has managed to survive by keeping her husband, son, grandchildren as well as close friends - kindred spirits - central to her life.

The book is particularly illuminating and revealing about her working life - she must begin every new book she writes on January 8th or else abandon it for a year.

'The Sum of the Days', based on Allende's own journals and daily correspondence with her mother in Chile, reveals the author to be a dazzling, generous, warm and hysterically funny matriarch within her swirl of family and friends.

More books by Isabel Allende