Inés of My Soul - Isabel Allende Audiobook

Written by Isabel Allende
Read by Blair Brown
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Harper Audio: 2006
12hrs 30min

Only months after the inauguration of Chile’s first female president, Allende recounts in her usual sweeping style the grand tale of Doña Inés Suárez (1507– 1580), arguably the country’s founding mother Writing in the year of her death, Inés tells of her modest girlhood in Spain and traveling to the New World.

Born into a poor family in Spain, Inés, a seamstress, finds herself condemned to a life of hard work without reward or hope for the future. It is the sixteenth century, the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and when her shiftless husband disappears to the New World, Inés uses the opportunity to search for him as an excuse to flee her stifling homeland and seek adventure. After her treacherous journey takes her to Peru, she learns that her husband has died in battle. Soon she begins a fiery love affair with a man who will change the course of her life: Pedro de Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro.

Valdivia’s dream is to succeed where other Spaniards have failed: to become the conqueror of Chile. The natives of Chile are fearsome warriors, and the land is rumored to be barren of gold, but this suits Valdivia, who seeks only honor and glory. Together the lovers Inés Suárez and Pedro de Valdivia will build the new city of Santiago, and they will wage a bloody, ruthless war against the indigenous Chileans—the fierce local Indians led by the chief Michimalonko, and the even fiercer Mapuche from the south. The horrific struggle will change them forever, pulling each of them toward their separate destinies.

Inés narrates with a clear eye and a sensitivity to native peoples that rarely lapses into anachronistic political correctness. Basing the tale on documented events of her heroine’s life. Inés of My Soul is a work of breathtaking scope: meticulously researched, it engagingly dramatizes the known events of Inés Suárez’s life, crafting them into a novel full of the narrative brilliance and passion readers have come to expect from Isabel Allende.

This is the only commercial English language recording of this book. It has also been released for the blind by CNIB.

The books is divided into 6 episodes of her live, there are no chapters. For the upload I went with the original 81 tracks copied from ten disks changed the birate and retagged. I listen as I edit. This is a fascinating book, well worth your time.