“I have had to imagine very little,” Allende notes in her acknowledgments, and it’s true that her research is evident on every page, some of it harrowing. His verse provides her title and each chapter’s epigram, and invades her cast’s thoughts, adding welcome bursts of colour in a narrative that, for large chunks, reads like well-paced but highly condensed nonfiction. With his bulky shoulders and sharp gaze, Neruda sometimes threatens to do the same to Allende’s novel.

When the poet moves on to another safe house, Victor realises how “his guest had filled every nook and cranny with his huge presence”. But before that happens, they will have the chance to repay Neruda, hiding him in their home after communism is outlawed and a warrant is issued for his arrest. Over the coming decades there will be plenty more challenges for Victor and Roser, not least General Pinochet’s coup, which will see them exiled again, this time to Venezuela, like Allende herself. After a month at sea, they arrive on the day that the second world war breaks out in Europe. Neruda fills the Winnipeg, a cargo ship built for 20 seamen, with more than 2,000 Spaniards.

As happened in real life, Neruda has persuaded Chile’s president to provide asylum for a number of Spanish refugees, defying rightwing opposition and the Catholic church.

It’s thanks to the poet Pablo Neruda that they get there. “I have had to imagine very little,” she notes in her acknowledgments, and her research is evident on every page Acting out of fraternal loyalty rather than lust, Victor marries Roser so that she and his nephew can begin a new life with him in Chile. Separately, Victor, too, is imprisoned there, before escaping to track her down in Perpignan, where she and her baby son are sheltering with a Quaker family. Yet by the time the war is over, Roser is heavily pregnant and alone, and it will be a slower, infinitely more pragmatic – and more interesting – love that the novel ultimately celebrates.Īlong with some half a million other Spaniards fleeing Franco, Roser makes it to France, where she’s interned in the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp.

When his parents take in one of his father’s best piano students, Roser Bruguera, it’s Guillem that she falls in love with. Lanky Victor is in many ways the opposite of his brother, Guillem, a handsome militiaman.

A long petal of the sea