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

Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave. Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.

With an Introduction by Gabriel García MárquezA new translation by Douglas J. WeatherfordIn this stunning masterpiece of the surreal, Juan Preciado sets out on a strange quest, bound by a promise to his dying mother. Embarking down a parched and dusty road, Juan goes to seek his father, Pedro Páramo, from whom they fled many years ago. The ruined town of Comala is alive with whispers and shadows. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of desires and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the tyranny of the Páramo family. Womaniser, overlord and murderer, Juan's notorious father retains an eternal grip over Comala. Its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past in an extraordinary chorus of sensory images, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries.

'Fantastic, sexy and sometimes macabre. A latter-day Scheherazade, a true descendant of the skalds, a Teller of Tales. Extraordinary' Guardian Eva Luna, entwined with her lover in bed, is asked to tell him a story 'you have never told anyone before'. As she relates a tale of twenty-three interwoven parts, she knits a kaleidoscopic portrait of the people and landscape of South America. Here are guerillas and fortune-tellers, tyrants and great beauties, whores and peasants. These are stories of poverty and politics, passion and pain, tragedy and comedy, all gloriously imagined by one of the world's most captivating storytellers. 'Like a plate of hors-d'oeuvres, each one tempting, some as exquisite as caviare. Stunning' New York Times Book Review'Vital and compelling' The Times'Enchanting, magnificent. Absolute magic on every level' Cosmopolitan

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.

Infamous for the murder of Maria Iribarne, the artist Juan Pablo Castel is now writing a detailed account of his relationship with the victim from his prison cell: obsessed from the first moment he saw her examining one of his paintings, Castel had become fixated on her over the next months and fantasized over how they might meet again. When he happened upon her one day, a relationship was formed which swiftly convinced him of their mutual love. But Castel's growing paranoia would lead him to destroy the one thing he truly cared about... Sabato's first novel El Túnel (translated as The Outsider or The Tunnel ), written in 1948, is framed as the confession of the painter Juan Pablo Castel, who has murdered the only woman capable of understanding him. Sabato's novels were praised by authors such as Albert Camus and Graham Greene.

Set in Anglophile Chile and goldrush California during the middle years of the 19th century, a tale of how Eliza Sommers becomes embroiled in a forbidden love affair with the charismatic, but capricious Joaquin Andieta. When he disappears suddenly for California, she follows him.

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.

The second 'Captain Alatriste' novel, from a series which has sold 4 million copies worldwide

In her first novel in a thrilling adventure trilogy, the internationally acclaimed author brings her unique style of magical realism to a tale of adventure and peril set in the depths of the Amazon jungle.

Bestselling author Isabel Allende's first adult novel since Portrait in Sepia' - beautiful, disturbing and atmospheric.

Excellent, highly colloquial translation of Arr ancame la vida (see HLAS 48:5193), set in post-revolutionary Mexico. Peden has created a sparkling, irreverent Catalina, Mastretta's first-person protagonist who narrates her coming of age through a marriage to a retired general much older than hersel

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.

One of Carlos Fuentes’s greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa’s soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.

A magical short novel that weaves together two stories, two couples, two different times, and two grand passionsIn one of the narratives that comprise this superb new novel from Carlos Fuentes, we are introduced to Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a fabled orchestral conductor, and his great love Inez Prada, a renowned singer. In the other, Fuentes memorably delineates the very first encounter in human history between a man and a woman. In one, the intense drama of Berlioz's music for "The Damnation of Faust" informs the action; in the other, we watch as a slowly emergent love shapes the nature and character of the two protagonists. A beautiful crystal seal -- the meaning of which is a mystery that obsesses Atlan-Ferrara, who owns it -- unites these two narratives; the magical seal allows one to read unknown languages and hear impossible music, and it is the symbol of a shared love. The duality of Carlos Fuentes's brilliant new novel mirrors two eras, one in the deepest remote time and one in a time to come, but the passions evoked in both, reflected against each other like two sides of a crystal seal, break the limits of time and space and unite in one story. And, like the light refracted through the seal, it begins in prehistory and spirals out into infinity . . . In "Inez," we find Carlos Fuentes at the height of his magical and realist powers. This profound and beautiful work confirms his standing as Mexico's pre-eminent novelist.