Nearing the end of the Spanish Civil War, the young doctor Víctor Dalmau and the pianist Roser Bruguera escape from Barcelona through the Pyrenees mountain range under adverse conditions. Their first stop is France, from where, with the help of the world-famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, they travel on the ship Winnipeg to Chile, the South American country that the poet called the slender petal of the sea. They integrate into society, they almost believe that they have found peace and their lives have come to a standstill when, after Pinochet's military coup, they are forced to emigrate for the second time, this time to Venezuela. They return to Chile under adventurous circumstances, since, as the author says, "if you live enough, all circles close".
Swirling, moving and uplifting events and unusual characters guide the reader through the Europe and South America of the 20th century. There is no place in the world where I know better the nature of populist autocracies and coups ready to pounce, or the hope for the healing of the soul and the belief in the healing power of love, than in Latin America, but even more so in Chile. And there is no one who can tell about this more sensitively, more nuanced and more precisely than Isabel Allende.