World tour brings author to fans

By Mathew Dearnaley

Chilean-born novelist Isabel Allende drew 350 fans to a New Zealand Herald and Whitcoulls literary lunch in Auckland yesterday, midway through a 15-month world tour.

The tour follows seven years researching her eighth and latest novel, Daughter of Fortune, the story of a young Chilean woman who follows her love to gold-fevered San Francisco in 1849.

Allende, too, left her homeland, after the 1973 military coup which led to the assassination of her uncle, Chilean President Salvador Allende, and now lives in San Francisco.

She disclosed yesterday that the literary tour she began in December might be her last because it was taking too much time from her writing.

Now 56, she hopes to return to San Francisco for a week to make a start on her next novel on January 8.

That is the date she always begins literary undertakings - the anniversary of writing an epic letter to a dying grandfather - but then she will continue her tour until March, before closeting herself away for two years to finish the novel.

Unable to return to her grandfather's deathbed in Chile, she poured out her heart to him at a big table at her home, and that is where she starts her novels.

Allende, who was a journalist during the military coup and witnessed the bombing of the presidential palace, from which her uncle's body was carried out, stayed defiantly in Chile for a year afterwards, refusing to believe the military's grip would last.

Even now, she said, she would not live in a country with a conditional democracy.