Written in the early 1990s while her daughter Paula lay in a coma, Isabel Allende’s Paula began as a letter.

It was a way of keeping a daughter company, and perhaps of giving her the family history she might wake to find waiting. What emerged is one of Allende’s most personal books, and an act of attempting some sort of narrative defiance against the blunt fact of illness.

Allende moves through Chilean childhood, exile, marriage, the Pinochet years, inherited mythologies, difficult women, vanished countries, and the cruelties and absurdities that make up a life. The book has the sweep of her fiction, but its pressure is different: everything is being told from beside a hospital bed, where time has stalled and memory becomes the only available country. Paula is grief-work, yes, but not in the soft-focus sense. It is a writer using every weapon she has — story, ancestry, politics, humour, excess — to hold back silence for as long as she can.

Flamingo paperback, 1995. Good used condition with light age toning and shelf wear.