Tag: NetGalley

Book Review – My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende, trans. by Frances Riddle

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About the Book

Emilia del Valle was always destined for great things. Abandoned at birth by her Chilean aristocrat father, Emilia comes of age in nineteenth-century San Francisco as an independent and fiercely ambitious young woman, decades ahead of her time. She will do whatever it takes to pursue her life’s passion for writing, even if it means publishing under a man’s name.

When Emilia lands a position as a journalist for the Daily Examiner, her unwavering sense of adventure – and new-found determination to survive in her own name – leads her to seize the chance to cover a brewing civil war in Chile alongside another talented reporter.

But the assignment offers Emilia more than just an opportunity to prove herself as a writer. Before long she embarks on a treacherous, life-changing journey in a homeland she never knew, to uncover the truth about her father – and herself.

Format: Hardcover (304 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 6th May 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

My only previous experience of the work of Isabel Allende is A Long Petal of the Sea which I read back in 2022. I had been put off her books up to that point because she was known for her works of magic realism which is a genre I’ve been unable to get along with. However I really enjoyed A Long Petal of the Sea and when I saw this latest book was also a work of historical fiction I jumped at the chance to read it.

Essentially the author has created the fictional character of Emilia del Valle to enable her to explore a turbulent period of Chile’s history, namely the civil war that took place in that country in 1891 between the so-called ‘rebels’ who had the support of the Chilean Navy and supporters of the President José Manuel Balmaceda who controlled the Chilean Army.

I confess I found the early parts of the book a little slow because it’s quite a while before Emilia even arrives in Chile. However, by that time we’ve learned just what a determined young woman Emilia is, intent on pursuing a journalistic career despite the obstacles placed in her path and the sexism she experiences. ‘I recognize that it must be much easier to be a man, but I am not going to let that hold me back.’

Emilia even has to fight to have her articles published under her own name rather than a male pseudonym and the editor of the San Francisco newspaper she works for, The Daily Examiner, reluctantly agrees to send her to what is an active war zone only if accompanied by a male reporter, Eric Whelan. Even then she’s told to concentrate on producing ‘human interest’ stories rather than reporting from the front line. You won’t be surprised to learn Emilia ignores the latter instruction completely although we do get examples of her ability to describe the lives and motivations of people from every part of society in occasional transcripts of her newspaper articles.

Emilia’s journey from San Francisco to Chile is just one of the testing experiences she endures. When she arrives in Chile the reader is plunged into the complexity of the civil war with its rival factions. Whilst Whelan (whose first hand experiences we occasionally get) is embedded with the ‘rebel’ forces, Emilia uses her connections to get up close to the government side. The point where the two sides come together is where the book came alive for me. The brutality of war is really laid bare in the way the scenes of battle are described and, amazingly, Emilia finds herself right at the heart of it. ‘The deafening roar of bullets, cannon blasts, shouted orders, howls of pain, wails of dying men, the whinnying of terrified horses.’

Civil war not only divides countries, it divides people and families. Many combatants on both sides have no particular loyalty to the cause or desire to kill their fellow men and women. They often have no choice. And, as we discover, you definitely do not want to be on the losing side and experience the ruthless and bloody aftermath.

Emilia feels it is her mission to tell the stories of the ordinary men and women caught up in the conflict, in her words ‘to collect the dispersed fragments of those tales’. One of the most notable of these tales are those of the women known as ‘canteen girls’ whose task is to carry water and other supplies to men in the front line, even in the heat of battle.

Her experiences leave Emilia mentally – and physically – scarred, and wondering at mankind’s capacity for violence. ‘How is it possible that, from the dawn of their presence on earth, men have systematically set out to murder one another? What fatal madness do we carry in our soul?’ I suspect it’s a question many of us have thought about in recent times.

Emilia’s attempts to find her birth father form a secondary story line and one that makes up a less signficant element of the book than I’d envisaged from the blurb. However, it does provide the jumping-off point for the final part of the book which sees Emilia embark on an epic journey by land but first by sea. ‘Sea and more sea, short days and long nights, the sun winking out on the horizon, golden twilights, the moon gliding across the black sky, crimson sunrises, radiant noonday clarity, sepulchral clouds.’ It’s a journey that’s as much self-exploratory as geographical and gives the closing chapters a rather mystical air.

There were parts of My Name is Emilia del Valle that I found absolutely riveting and I enjoyed finding out more about the history of Chile and its culture. The author is known for creating strong female characters and Emilia is a brilliant example of this.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Bloomsbury via NetGalley.

In three words: Dramatic, immersive, authentic
Try something similar: The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse

About the Author

Isabel Allende, born in Peru and raised in Chile, is a novelist, feminist, and philanthropist. She is one of the most widely read authors in the world, having sold more than eighty million copies of her books across forty-two languages. She is the author of several bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Wind Knows My Name, Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. In addition to her work as a writer, Isabel devotes much of her time to human rights causes. She has received fifteen honorary doctorates, been inducted into the California Hall of Fame, and received the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018, she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She lives in California with her husband and dogs. 

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Book Review – The CIA Book Club by Charlie English @WmCollinsBooks @4thEstateBooks #ReadNonFicChal

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About the Book

Front cover of The CIA Book Club by Charlie English

For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.

No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.

Format: Hardcover (384 pages) Publisher: William Collins
Publication date: 13th March 2025 Genre: Nonfiction, History

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My Review

The fact the CIA was involved in smuggling books beyond the Iron Curtain to Poland and other Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe was a revelation to me. And that they supported the underground printing operations of activists working to counter the disinformation of the Polish government and get around its strict censorship laws. That’s hardly surprising because the operation has been described as the ‘best kept secret’ of the Cold War. In fact many of the participants never knew the source of the funding that enabled the programme to carry on.

Although I’m of an age to recall the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, I hadn’t realised the extent of the regime’s attempts to suppress the dissemination of non-state approved information. Not only were many books banned, every typewriter had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted and a permit was needed to buy paper in any quantity. If Poles wanted to create a business card, a rubber stamp or even a sheet of music it had to be approved by a censor. Some of the censorship decisions were positively bizarre. The author cites the example of a book about growing carrots that was destroyed for implying vegetables could grow in individuals’ gardens as well as in those run by collectives.

Disseminating information about what was really going on could end you up in jail, probably after a severe beating up by the secret police. One of the people highlighted in the book is Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured just such treatment, as well as force-feeding when he embarked on a hunger strike in prison. Forced into exile in the West, he continued to be involved in directing increasingly daring smuggling operations.

The other key character is George Minden, the CIA’s mastermind behind the programme who continued to believe, in the face of opposition from his own superiors at times, in the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. As the author describes it, a sort of literary humanitarian aid, the bookish equivalent of food parcels.

The details of some of the smuggling operations are astounding with printing presses, books and other material cunningly concealed in vehicles to evade border checks or carried by individuals travelling between Poland and other countries. However, some more outlandish ideas such as smuggling miniature books in Tampax boxes were rejected. Even once inside the country, distribution was a highly dangerous affair requiring much ingenuity by those involved. Information was on a strictly ‘need to know’ basis with many in the network never learning the identity of others involved further up or down the chain. Precautions had to be taken against telephone lines being tapped or locations bugged. Members of the underground publishing network were forced to adopt elaborate precautions to avoid detection (referred to as ‘health and safety’ procedures) many of which could have come straight out of a John le Carre novel, or the film French Connection.

When it came to underground printing operations, the author explains even more ingenuity was required. ‘Rex-Rotary and A. B. Dick presses sat behind fake walls, false chimneys and heavy wardrobes, in loft spaces above rural barns and in kitchen cellars beneath trapdoors hidden by a fridge. The output of these machines was carried around in rucksacks, and suitcases, or tied to men’s backs beneath their coats, and dead-dropped in tree holes, under drain covers or beneath church pews.’

The book has an incredible amount of detail and it’s clear the author has been meticulous in his research. As an illustration, I was only at 80% on my Kindle copy when I reached the epilogue, the rest of the book being bibliography, notes, etc. I found the book had so much detail that I had to dip in and out of it over a few weeks. There are a lot of people mentioned, not all of whom play a prominent role in the story. Much of the book is taken up with the evolution of the Solidarity movement, a journey not without its setbacks including a period of brutal suppression by the Soviet-backed Polish government. The book taught me a lot about the history of the period and made me appreciate why Poland, given its history, has good reason to fear Russian aggression even today.

The CIA Book Club demonstrates in a very readable way how the written word can be a weapon in the fight for freedom and how banning books in order to suppress freedom of thought and speech is ultimately always doomed to fail.

I received a review copy courtesy of William Collins via NetGalley. The CIA Book Club fits the History cayegory of the Nonfiction Reader Challenge hosted by Shellyrae at Book’d Out.

In three words: Fascinating, well-researched, detailed
Try something similar: The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English

About the Author

Author Charlie English (Photo: Amazon author page)

Charlie English is a British non-fiction author and former head of international news at the Guardian. He has written three books, including The Snow Tourist (2008) and The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, aka The Storied City (2017). His third, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, was published in August 2021. He lives in London with his family.

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