Isabel Allende is known the world over for her historical novels that square fact and fiction to reveal the truths about society. In her latest novel, The Wind Knows My Name, she brings us again a riveting and immersive story based on real lives and real events. The novel covers decades. We first meet five-year-old Samuel Adler in 1938 in Vienna as the Nazi’s move in to occupy Austria. His mother makes the painful decision to secure a spot for him on a Kindertransport train and send him to England.
In 2019 —eight decades later—we meet Anita Diaz, a young blind girl who has boarded another train to flee the unspeakable danger in her home country of El Salvador.
How does Anita end up in Arizona? And then, how does her circuitous journey—alone and displaced—lead her to the home of a now 86-year-old Samuel Adler living in Berkeley? What does Samuel still have to learn from this other refugee about what he calls his sin of indifference and holding on to dreams?
