What I enjoyed best about The Wind Knows My Name is probably the structure. Ultimately, a series of women who have persevered in the face of trauma and adversity bring the two together, refusing to let broken and corrupt systems prevent them from helping those most in need of care and understanding. About 80 years later, Anita’s mother brought her to the US/Mexico border to help them escape from a man who tried to kill her only for US immigration agents to separate them as they sought asylum leaving the young girl at the mercy of an over-worked, underfunded and too often unsympathetic system. Of her other novels that I’ve read so far, I’d have to say it put me most in mind of In the Midst of Winter and the more I reflect on the two books, the more parallels I see but in that way that I used to love teasing out in my college lit courses – examining how a writer returns to the same/similar themes and explores them in different ways over time.Īs a five-year-old, Samuel Adler’s mother sent him to the UK as part of the Kindertransport to get him safely away from Austria after Kristallnacht. The translation of her novel, The Wind Knows My Name will be released soon and as with so many of her novels, it explores the long-lasting effects of trauma and how it shapes the people we become – in this case, drawing parallels between the humanitarian crisis of Jewish refugees in the early days of the Holocaust and the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border in recent years (compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic). In the last few years, I’ve been working on catching myself up on Isabel Allende’s existing catalogue in between releases of the English translations of her newer titles.

Allende in the midst of winter