Franco wins, and a country empties. In the winter of 1939 hundreds of thousands of Spanish Republicans cross the Pyrenees on foot toward the French border, and Isabel Allende begins her novel among them, with Victor Dalmau, an army doctor, and Roser, a pregnant young widow who loved his brother.

They marry to survive, neither of them wanting it, and sail with 2,200 other refugees aboard the SS Winnipeg, the passage Pablo Neruda arranged to Chile, while the rest of Europe moves toward its own war. The second half of the book belongs to that country. Allende gives her exiles decades rather than scenes: work, a child, friendships made among strangers, a marriage they never chose and have to live inside anyway. Chile treats them well for a long time, and then Chilean politics turns, and the fight between freedom and repression they thought they had left behind stands in front of them again.

Allende runs invented lives through documented history here, and the prose stays plain and patient, closer to chronicle than to melodrama. Plaza y Janés published it in Spanish in 2019; Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson made the English translation. It was the most-read book in Spain between April 2019 and April 2020. Read it for the long view of what exile costs and what people build anyway.