![]() ![]() ![]() During the mass exodus from Spain to France that followed, refugees Victor and Roser, forced to wed, find passage on a ship bound for Chile. The Nationalists, led by Gen. Francisco Franco, defeated the Republican Army. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. ![]() The rest of Victor's family – father Marcel and mother Carme, along with Marcel’s student Roser Bruguera – is steadfast on the side of the losing Republican cause. Isabel Allende’s latest book, A Long Petal of the Sea, follows a pregnant young widow who finds her life intertwined with an army doctor who is the brother of her deceased love. The war, often historically overshadowed by World War II, which quickly followed it, is a brutal precursor of the horrors to come. Victor joined the Republican Army in 1936, along with his brother Guillem, while still in medical school. Victor Dalmau, a young medic caring for the wounded during the Spanish Civil War, restores the beating heart of a young soldier with the caress of his fingers. Even so, the effort almost killed him, and after a few steps he gave up. Isabel Allende’s latest novel, “A Long Petal of the Sea” (Ballantine, 336 pp., ★★★ out of four), begins, as it ends, with the heart. One winter’s day, when he came upon her crouched shivering in a ditch with her three goats, soaked from the rain and flushed with fever, Don Santiago tied up the goats and slung her over his shoulder like a sack, thankful she was so small and weighed so little. As the journey unfolds, the family of protagonists becomes so round and relatable that a reader is left with not only an increased knowledge of historical and political events but a genuine sense of loss when the book concludes. View Gallery: Winter reading guide: This season’s must-read books A Long Petal of the Sea takes readers from 1930s Spain to France, Chile, and Venezuela it concludes in Chile in 1994. ![]()
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