Portrait in Sepia - Isabel Allende

As a young girl, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that erased the first five years of her life from her mind. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, she grows up with privilege, comfort and everything she could ask for. But while she is free of the limitations that most other women face, she is tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what had such a devastating effect on her young life all those years ago. Portrait in Sepia is both a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile and a marvellous family saga, peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits. This engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.