THE OTHER ALLENDE .....

It's not often these days that I pick up a book and can't put it down. However, at 3.30am have just finished reading an astonishing memoir by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende. Like most books on my bedside table, it's not exactly current as due to the speed with which I read Oxfam is my library of choice. But Paula , published some years ago, is nevertheless worth seeking out. A consummate storyteller, Allende, whose cousin was Salvador Allende, somehow manages to combine the tragic tale of a terminally ill daughter with an ultimately positve spiritual message, political passion and a journalist's eye for the minutiae which make up our lives - and deaths. The Marxist poet Pablo Neruda, who died shortly after the terrible coup in 1973, told her once she was the "worst journalist in Chile. " He was wrong. She's not only a great journalist but a fantastic and inspiring writer. And as a new memoir has just been published may just patronise Waterstone's for once....