A Long Petal of the Sea
by Isabel Allende
(Bloomsbury, £15.29)

ISABEL ALLENDE’S latest fiction takes us on an epic journey from republican Spain in 1936 during the civil war to Chile and Salvador Allende’s short-lived socialist government, drowned in blood by Pinochet’s military coup which lasted until 1994.

This history lesson packaged in a novel highlights the struggle for social justice and the lengths to which a wealthy elite, in cahoots with its powerful foreign supporters, will go to prevent the success of that struggle.

Accompanying the fictitious Dalmau family through the real events of the period, Allende takes us on a turbulent, dramatic and emotional roller-coaster which is by turns gripping, tragic, uplifting and humbling.

While Allende has a tendency to endow her characters with overt symbolic significance, fulfilling an underlying pedagogic purpose, her clear and engaging narrative style and always fresh imaginative powers prevent this becoming irritating.

The novel starts in the late 1930s, as the civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his fascists succeeded in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee the country by making the treacherous journey over the mountains to the safety of France, where many are held in appalling concentration camps.

Among them is Roser Bruguera, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, a republican army doctor and the brother of her deceased lover.

They, with hundreds of others, are forced to flee their beloved Barcelona into exile.

To survive, the two are obliged to enter a sham marriage which nevertheless helps forge a strong bond between them. The tragedy of the Spanish civil war changes both their lives and the fate of their country forever.

When the opportunity of refuge in Chile arises, they take it and board a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to the promised “long petal of sea and wine and snow.”

There, they become enmeshed in a rich web of characters, destined to participate in the battle between freedom and repression as it unfolds in Chile, who come together over the course of four generations,

Unlikely partners Dalmau and Bruguera embrace exile as the rest of Europe erupts into world war. But, starting life again on a new continent, their trials are just beginning. They experience joy and pain as they long for the day when they will be exiles no more.

While treating historical events, Allende’s novel offers lessons  for our own times as millions are  forced into exile and the ongoing struggle for justice in the face of danger from a rising right wing.

She has produced a masterful work of historical fiction about hope, exile and belonging.