Open Book

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BBC Radio 4 LW

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics

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Open Book: Isabel Allende

16/02/2020

Isabel Allende

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende, Magic Realism, The Foundling

A special interview with Isabel Allende on her novel A Long Petal of the Sea which spans the turmoil of  20th century.

Mariella Frostrup talks to the novelist Isabel Allende about her new novel A Long Petal of the Sea,  a story of displacement and of love,  as a young couple travel from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War to Chile in 1939 to start a new life. She discusses her life in writing, migration, exile, and finding new love in her 70s. 

Also, writer Menna van Praag celebrates the enduring appeal of magical realism from Allende to Mohsin Hamid.

And writer Stacey Halls, whose debut novel The Familiars was a breakthrough success last year,  visits The Foundling Museum in London to talk about the inspiration she found in the stories of women and their lost children for her latest novel,  The Foundling.

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