Margaret Sayers Peden Books

An autobiography of the life and family of Chilean author, Isabel Allende.

Perhaps the most ambitious novel from one of Mexico's greatest writers, the narrative covers 20 centuries of European and American culture, and prominently features the construction of El Escorial by Philip II. The title is Latin for "Our earth". Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. -Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.- Milan Kundera

Allende tackles her homeland head-on in this staggering, epic romance Portrait in Sepia is both a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile and a marvellous family saga peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits, two of Allende's most celebrated novels. As a young girl, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that has shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed, epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.

Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such village of the mind, Comala, he set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed, Susana San Juan.

Sixteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his grandmother, a writer for a geography magazine, to the remote Forbidden Kingdom in the Himalayas to help locate a sacred statue of a golden dragon before it is stolen by a greedy outsider.

From one of the world's best loved storytellers, the trilogy that began with City of the Beasts comes to a thrilling climax. Alexander Cold knows all too well his grandmother Kate is never far from an adventure. When National Geographic commissions her to write an article about the first elephant-led safaris in Africa, they head - with Nadia Santos and the magazine's photography crew - to the blazing, red plains of Kenya. Days into the tour, a Catholic missionary approaches the camp in search of his companions who have mysteriously disappeared. Kate, Alexander, Nadia, and their team, agreeing to aid the rescue, enlists the help of a local pilot to lead them to the swampy forests of Ngoube. There they discover a clan of Pygmies who unveil a harsh and surprising world of corruption, slavery, and poaching. Alexander and Nadia, entrusting the magical strengths of Jaguar and Eagle, their totemic animal spirits, launch a spectacular and precarious struggle to restore freedom and return leadership to its rightful hands. The final instalment of Isabel Allende's celebrated trilogy soars with radiant settings, spirits, beings - and the transformation of an extraordinary friendship.

A Chilean woman searches for her lover in the goldfields of 1840s California. Arriving as a stowaway, Eliza finances her search with various jobs, including playing the piano in a brothel

When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his individualistic grandmother on an expedition to find a humanoid Beast in the Amazon, he experiences ancient wonders and a supernatural world as he tries to avert disaster for the Indians.

Charles Reeves is a preacher, mystic and formulator of the Infinite Plan - his philosophy of life. The Reeveses settle in a Mexican barrio outside Los Angeles, awaiting Charles death. His son, Greg, is left to explore the truth of the "Plan". By the author of "Eva Luna" and "Of Love and Shadows".

An adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well. After many adventures - fierce battles with pirates at sea, and rescues - Diego de la Vega, aka Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.