Skip to main content

Features

Isabel Allende, author of Violeta

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Through her father’s prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy.

Week of January 23, 2023

Paperback releases for the week of January 23rd include THE BIG DARK SKY by Dean Koontz, an exhilarating, twist-filled thriller in which a group of strangers bound by terrifying synchronicity becomes humankind’s hope for survival; VIOLETA, a sweeping novel from Isabel Allende, who tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans 100 years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the 20th century; LORRAINE HANSBERRY by Charles J. Shields, a moving account of the life of the woman behind "A Raisin in the Sun," the most widely anthologized, read and performed play of the American stage; and Julie Otsuka's THE SWIMMERS, a searing, intimate story about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool.