The Wind Knows My Name

In Allende’s latest study of love, suffering, and the steady reach of the past, five-year-old violin prodigy Samuel Adler waves goodbye to his mother in 1938 Vienna as he boards a train that will allow him to escape the Nazis while decades later seven-year-old Anita Díaz is pulled from her mother at the U.S.-Mexico border after they flee El Salvador for safety. As the narrative unfolds Samuel’s childhood in England, move to the United States as he passionately discovers jazz, and marriage to the freewheeling Nadine, his story converges beautifully with that of Anita, told through the efforts of Selena Durán to rescue her from the institutionalized cruelty of the U.S. immigration system. Selena is founder of the Magnolia Project, designed to help children like Anita, which brings in a lawyer named Frank who starts by falling for Selena and ends by embracing the project. Meanwhile, readers learn about Letitia, who fled the terrors of the El Mozote massacre as a child and whose story binds together all these characters.