Aphrodite by Isabel Allende

Cloth; Used. As New. Dust Jacket: Fine. Aphrodite by Isabel Allende. Remainder Marked. Illustrations by Robert Shekter. Recipes by Panchita Llona. First Edition/First Printing. Biography.

"Allende's seventh book follows the author's tradition of semi-autobiographical literature; it is a memoir of return to life, written after her 1997 novel Paula about the painful loss of her daughter. In the introduction, Allende states that her re-awakening to sensual pleasures marked her exit from the three-year period of sadness. The critics, calling Aphrodite an unusually "light" work for an author of customarily weightier literature, still praised it as a life-affirming sequel to the grief and anguish of Paula.

Aphrodite's anything-but-linear narrative is a mix of the author's romantic and culinary musings and recollections, her friends' stories, world recipes, excerpts from erotic texts, folktales, mythology, anthropology, poetry, travel writing, ancient and historical anecdotes, even gossip. In Allende's words, Aphrodite is "a mapless journey through the regions of sensual memory, in which the boundaries between love and appetite are so diffuse that at times they evaporate completely.""