ISABEL ALLENDE: The Wind Knows My Name

In 1938 Samuel Adler, aged five, escapes the new Nazi regime in Austria with other Jewish children on the Kindertransport. He will lose his entire family to the Holocaust, but his prodigious talent as a violinist will see him forge a lifelong career in England and, later, America. In the 2020s, in California during the Covid pandemic, seven-year-old Anita Diaz, a refugee from war-torn El Salvador, is separated from her mother by the Trump administration’s harsh policy towards illegal migrants. Like Samuel decades earlier, she drifts from one form of fostering to another while Selena, a Latina lawyer with a refugee background, tries to find Anita a permanent home and track down her mother.

Family ties and tragedies have been Isabel Allende’s stock-in-trade since her 1980s debut with The House of the Spirits, which was richly steeped in magic realism. She is a master storyteller and her novels are always good and occasionally outstanding. I would rate The Wind Knows My Name – really that title is a bit daft – as one of her good rather than great efforts. The characters are vividly drawn, but the plot is contrived and the writing is somewhat uneven compared to her greatest novels, which may be the author’s fault or her editor’s or perhaps her translator’s. Some chapters narrated by Anita as if talking to her dead sister, I found cloying and clumsy. But, slightly flawed, this is a rewarding read and, in several parts, it tugs hard on your heartstrings.