A Long Petal of the Sea

Allende joins the Spanish Republican exile with the Chilean exile in a novel that is, above all, a story of love and loss. The Winnipeg and Neruda's gesture are real history; the fiction she builds around them is more conventional than some of her other work, but it has that human warmth that is her hallmark. For those who want to understand the intersection of two twentieth-century political tragedies through characters who matter.