The Sum of Our Days

Isabel Allende's latest book, The Sum of Our Days, is a bittersweet portrait of her and her family. I enjoyed the book for its moments of sadness and the joy that children brought in everyone's lives. The searing pain of losing Paula, but being with her in spirit was wonderful.

'There's nothing as boring as listening to other people's dreams,' says Isabel Allende, mock-apologising for relating one of her own. The phrase recalls a similar observation by the indomitable Pauline Mole, mother of Sue Townsend's famous diarist Adrian, who once commented: 'The only thing more boring than listening to other people's dreams is listening to other people's problems.' Fortunately, neither applies to Allende, who manages in her third volume of memoir to make her own domestic problems seem quite ordinary, yet at the same time lifts them to the uniquely novelistic.