PAULA PB

In December 1991 Allende’s daughter Paula aged 26 fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. This book started as a letter to Paula written during the hours spent at her bedside and became a personal memoir and a testament to the ties that bind families – a brave enlightening inspiring true story.This book was written during the interminable hours the novelist Isabel Allende spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital in her hotel room and beside her daughter Paula's bed during the summer and autumn of 1992. Faced with the loss of her child Isabel Allende turned to storytelling to sustain her own spirit and to convey to her daughter the will to wake up to survive. The story she tells is that of her own life her family history and the tragedy of her nation Chile in the years leading up to Pinochet's brutal military coup.