The Wind Knows My Name

Name: The Wind Knows My Name
Author: Isabel Allende, translated by Frances Riddle
ISBN: 9780593598108

by Isabel Allende, translated by Frances Riddle

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “The lives of a Jewish boy escaping Nazi-occupied Europe and a mother and daughter fleeing twenty-first-century El Salvador intersect in this ambitious, intricate novel about war and immigration” (People), from the author of A Long Petal of the Sea and Violeta “Timely, provocative . . . emotionally satisfying . . . [a story about] the kindness of strangers who become family.”—The New York Times Book Review AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht—the night his family loses everything. As her child’s safety becomes ever harder to guarantee, Samuel’s mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England.…

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"When I learned Isabel Allende’s latest novel is set in my hometown of Nogales, Ariz., I put it on my reading list. I wanted to know: Is her story as dearly held as my memory of a childhood of blended language and culture, of my grandmother’s whistled greetings to her neighbors? Children trapped by geopolitical violence and left to navigate immigration by themselves are the inspiration for this story. The novel is a powerful love letter to them. Their catharsis is both reference and refrain, evoked as a whistling in the dark of a forever song of hope. You can hear it in these pages, as I once did in the resilient neighborhoods of Nogales."

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