Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité - known as Tété - is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride, the beautiful Eugenia Garcia del Solar-but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.

Against the merciless backdrop of sugar cane fields, the lives of Tété and Valmorain grow ever more intertwined. When the bloody revolution of Toussaint Louverture arrives at the gates of Saint Lazare, they flee the island that will become Haiti for the decadence and opportunity of New Orleans. There, Tété finally forges a new life - but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not so easily severed.

With an impressive richness of detail, and a narrative wit and brio second to none, Isabel Allende sweeps the reader from the oppressive, brutal conditions of the French colony to the sophisticated urban life of Creole New Orleans. In Tété, she has created perhaps her most appealing protagonist, and surrounded her with a cast of compelling characters that includes Prosper Cambray, the violent overseer of Saint Lazare; Violette Boisier, a famed courtesan who is forever changed by her relationship with Valmorain; Tante Rose, the medicine woman who teaches Tété to heal others; and Père Antoine, the priest who helps her heal herself.

Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been so battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruelest of circumstances.

Paperback
01-05-2010
HarperCollins Publishers
9780007348664
232 x 152 mm
457