GARCIA-NAVARRO: How were immigrants and refugees treated in Chile at that time?ĪLLENDE: Well, Chile was at the south of the south of the world, a very insular country. And I had the inclination or the need to tell the story recently because the tragedy of refugees is in the air. And this man, who became my friend, told me his story, which I kept in my memory and my heart for 40 years. And he was one of the passengers of that ship that took these people to Chile - the Winnipeg. I had a very good friend that I met when I was living in exile in Venezuela. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The main character, Victor, is based on a real person.ĪLLENDE: Yes. The refugees that came to Chile arrived in Valparaiso, the port, the same day that the Second World War started in Europe. And then the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda managed to send 2,200 of those people to Chile. There was not even water - drinking water, nothing.Īnd it was a cold, horrible winter in 1939. They closed beaches with barbed wire and just dumped people there. They placed them in improvised concentration camps. And France didn't know what to do with them. And when the fascist armies of Franco were surrounding Barcelona, half a million people walked to their border with France, asking for asylum. Why did you want to start there?ĪLLENDE: Well, because this is the story of the 2,200 refugees - Spanish refugees - that went to Chile. This novel starts in Spain, nearing the end of the Spanish Civil War on the side of the losing Republicans. It is my great pleasure to welcome the world's best-selling Spanish-language author, Isabel Allende. The story is a personal one for Allende, mirroring her own experience of fleeing her country, Chile, after the overthrow of her relative Salvador Allende. What follows is an epic tale of exile, loss, resilience and love. So much blood ran that the following year, the peasants swore that when they pulled up their onions, they were red and that they had found human teeth in their potatoes, she writes.

Isabel Allende's new novel, 'A Long Petal Of The Sea,' begins in the horror of war in Europe.

A long petal of the sea en español