Starting over on a new continent, their trials are just beginning, and over the course of their lives, they will face trial after trial. Together with two thousand other refugees, they embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, they embrace exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war.
In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. 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.From the author of The House of the Spirits, this epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home. The Nationalists, led by Gen. Francisco Franco, defeated the Republican Army. 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. 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.
Isabel Allende’s latest novel, “A Long Petal of the Sea” (Ballantine, 336 pp., ★★★ out of four), begins, as it ends, with the heart.
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