Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende
HarperCollins $26.00

Often described as one of the world's consummate storytellers, Isabel Allende has done it again. "Portrait in Sepia" is a thoroughly enjoyable novel set in nineteenth-century California and Chile.

Aurora del Valle has spent her childhood and adolescence under the comfortable wing of her rich and domineering paternal grandmother, Paulina, who runs a trading company. But after the experience of being kidnapped when she was five, Aurora is still tormented by persistent nightmares. Unable to remember anything about her early childhood, Aurora, at the age of thirty, decides to recover her history. This quest takes us back to the Chinatown of 1880 in San Francisco, where (after her mother dies in childbirth) Aurora is lovingly cared for by her grandparents, a Chinese doctor and his Chilean-English wife. Aurora has become a talented photographer.

Looking back on her life, she makes the following analogy: "Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story; I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses that luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone for telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia."

This rich novel can stand alone, without reference to Allende's two previous novels concerning the del Valles, "Daughter of Fortune" and "House of Spirits."

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