Although she has traveled around the world, and has lived in the United States for more than a decade, Isabel Allende considers Latin America her true home, and sets her fiction there. She was born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru, where her Chilean father held a diplomatic post. After her parents divorced, Allende and her siblings went to live with her mother's parents in Santiago, Chile. She had no contact with her father for the rest of her life, but kept close ties to his family, including his cousin Salvador Allende, who became president of Chile in 1970.

As a child, Allende read eagerly and traveled widely. Her mother remarried, and the family lived in Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East before returning to Chile when Allende was fifteen. Her life was rather ordinary for the next several years: she went to school, married, had two children...