In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, thousands of Spaniards fled the victorious dictator's harsh regime. Thanks to the intervention of the poet Pablo Neruda, more than 2,000 Spanish refugees emigrated to Chile aboard a French steamer, the Winnipeg, in 1939. Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits) traces the lives of a refugee couple, Roser and Victor Dalmau, and their connection to a powerful Chilean family in her sweeping novel A Long Petal of the Sea.
Roser is a young piano prodigy who comes to Barcelona to study music with Victor's father. She ends up falling in love with Victor's brother, Guillem, and is carrying Guillem's child by the time both brothers are caught up in the war. A series of particularly brutal battles (one of which causes Guillem's death) forces Victor and Roser to flee the country aboard the Winnipeg. In Chile, they are taken in by the idealistic son of a wealthy family, and rather grudgingly agree to live as man and wife, caring for the child, Marcel. Allende follows the intertwined fortunes of both families over the next six decades, as Victor and Roser struggle to build a life out of components they would not have chosen. They gradually come to respect, admire and then love one another, but both of them wrestle with the realities of lives shaped powerfully by war and death.
Even as Roser and Victor establish themselves in Chile, they long for Spain. Allende brings them through joys and challenges with grit, grace and stubborn hope. A Long Petal of the Sea is sprawling, sometimes difficult but ultimately satisfying. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams