Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor and wisdom,  The Sum of Our Days  is a portrait of a contemporary family, tied together by the love, strong will, and stubborn determination of a beloved matriarch, the indomitable New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits , Isabel Allende.   "An inspiring and thought-provoking work." – Denver Post     Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory—and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.   In this sequel to her memoir Paula (1995), about the year-long coma suffered by her daughter, Chilean novelist Allende tells of the difficult years following Paula’s death. She makes a transformative journey in these pages, from the moving opening chapter, in which the grief-stricken author and her family scatter Paula’s ashes in the forest, to the final rewarding coda, where she is able to once again experience contentment and gratitude for the abundance in her life. Framing her story around her family, and directly addressing her daughter throughout, Allende reveals herself in all her roles: feisty marital partner, intrusive mother, dedicated writer, and spiritual seeker. She takes great comfort from her wide circle of support, a loosely connected network she refers to as her tribe, which provides her with the “three-ring circus material” she needs for her writing. Among the many personal revelations she makes here are her daughter-in-law’s discovery that she is gay, which broke up her marriage to Allende’s son and launched the author into a laborious matchmaking process to help him remarry, and her own imbibing of a hallucinogenic tea, which subsequently helped awaken her imagination during the writing of her children’s books. Surprisingly candid, frequently funny, and highly aware of her own failings, Allende is a person fully engaged in life, and readers will find her eloquent memoir inspirational reading. --Joanne Wilkinson “Allende is a genius.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review “Surely one of the most graceful and yet haunting writers alive.” - St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Allende projects a women’s point of view with confidence, control, and an expansive definition of romance as a fact of life.” - Time magazine “A vibrant voice, which is at once introspective and forthright…an inspiring and thought-provoking work…The insights resonate, on page after page.” - Denver Post “THE SUM OF OUR DAYS is terrific. It’s funny, insightful, moving and filled with Allende’s unique voice.” - USA Today “Allende’s THE SUM OF OUR DAYS adds up to an exuberant love letter―not only to her daughter, but to her tribe and anyone lucky enough to belong to one.” - St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Allende’s trademark magical realism is ever present...This high-spirited, emotionally packed book enables readers to get a closer look at the life of a much-loved writer.” - Library Journal “A powerful memoir” - Seattle Post-Intelligencer “...Ms.Allende...executes this epistolary memoir with the same authenticity and poetry that grace her fiction...Ms. Allende is a survivor worth reading and emulating.” - Dallas Morning News “A warm meditation on family and love…A book to be savored and reread.” - Kirkus Reviews “A deeply revealing memoir . . . Allende’s insight is keen, her prose polished and her language hypnotic . . . This is a book to savor.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss—the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily letters the author and her mother, who lives in Chile, wrote to each other, Allende bares her soul in a book that is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. She recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her that becomes a new kind of family. Throughout, Allende shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory. Here, too, are the amazing stories behind Allende’s books, the superstitions that guide her writing process, and her adventurous travels. Ultimately, The Sum of Our Days offers a unique tour of this gifted writer’s inner world and of the relationships that have become essential to her life and her work. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, bound together by the love, fierce loyalty, and stubborn determination of a beloved,