In the Midst of Winter
New York Times and worldwide bestselling “dazzling storyteller” (Associated Press) Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel about three very different people who are brought together in a mesmerizing story that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil.
In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident - which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster — a 60-year-old human rights scholar — hits the car of Evelyn Ortega — a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala — in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen and far more serious turn when Evelyn turns up at the professor’s house seeking help. At a loss, the professor asks his tenant Lucia Maraz — a 62-year-old lecturer from Chile — for her advice.
These three very different people are brought together in a mesmerizing story that moves from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil, sparking the beginning of a long overdue love story between Richard and Lucia.
Exploring the timely issues of human rights and the plight of immigrants and refugees, the book recalls Allende’s landmark novel The House of the Spirits in the way it embraces the cause of “humanity, and it does so with passion, humor, and wisdom that transcend politics” (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post). In the Midst of Winter will stay with you long after you turn the final page.
Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East, as her peripatetic family followed her stepfather's diplomatic career. She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup. Afterwards Allende fled her home and settled in Venezuela with her husband, son and daughter. She now lives in the San Francisco area with her American husband and their respective extended families.
Isabel Allende took the literary world by storm with the publication of "The House of the Spirits", a novel which chronicled four generations of a Chilean family against the backdrop of Chile's brutal history. The Times of London heralded Allende as having "the rare ability to blend fantasy and legend with political fact and a well-plotted narrative to produce an enchanted world unlike anything else in contemporary fiction." The New York Times called the book "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America."
“The world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”, Isabel Allende is now synonymous with the spiritual universe ofLatin America. A writer who has invested so much fantasy and imagination to narrate and describe the inimitable beauty of a continent that still remains an indecipherable enigma to the Western civilization, she has enchanted a couple of generations of readers. “The House of the Spirits” (1982) is a pivotal literary work, a chronology of one of the most mesmerizing family epics that aesthetically fuses the political, the sentimental and the transcendental. Isabel Allende was awarded the most prestigious literary prize of Chile, her native country, - Chilean National Prize for Literature. With the 18 published novels translated into more than 30 languages, her talent has marked indelibly the artistic world of the past 30 years.