Wouldn't you love to explore a library or bookstore with your favorite author? Award-winning Chilean author Isabel Allende shares her favorite memories from among the stacks.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
There were no libraries where kids could go in Chile during the 1940s—not even at school. My library was at home. I had an uncle who collected books, and I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. No censorship.

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks?
Usually I find the most valuable help from booksellers, because I tend to buy the books I use for research for my novels. When I need original documents for a historical novel, I contact librarians from the Library of Congress.

What are your bookstore rituals?
I go every day to my local bookstore (Book Passage) for coffee and browsing in the morning. First, I stop at the audiobooks shelf because I need stories for my commute. Then I talk to whichever bookseller happens to be there and get some input about new books, especially novels. Once a week, I talk to Susan in the children's department. She keeps a list of my favorite books to give to kids when I need a gift and new releases she thinks I would like. 

Read our review of A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende.

What's the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore?
A CD of Tom Hanks' short story collection, Uncommon Type, Ann Patchett's recent novel, The Dutch House, as well as five children's and young adult books for my husband's grandchildren. 

What's your favorite library in the world?
It's hard to name just one. I have visited several famous libraries, like the Library of Congress, where I received an award. If I had to choose, I would say the Melk Abbey library near Vienna. I was invited there to a meeting of religious leaders from all over the world and had the privilege of visiting the vault where the most valuable ancient manuscripts are kept. It was a memorable experience. I was even allowed to touch an incunable with white cotton gloves—while being watched closely by a Benedictine librarian who was almost as ancient as the book. 

Do you have a "bucket list" of bookstores and libraries you'd love to visit but haven't yet?
Two come to mind: Shakespeare & Company in Paris and El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires. The first because I have been there with no time to browse properly (it's charming!), and the second because it's set in a beautiful, old opera house. In a city with more bookstores per capita than any other in the world, El Ateneo is considered the most stunning. 

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
Probably the haunting library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Carlos Ruis Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind. But I am sure there are many more. 

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
I like all animals, but given the choice, I would like to have dogs at my favorite bookstore, so I could pet them while I browse and have my morning coffee.

What's your favorite snack when browsing in a bookstore?
Hopefully excellent coffee and biscotti. 

Isabel Allende is a recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Her latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, is an epic saga set during the Spanish Civil War that follows two young people as they escape aboard poet Pablo Neruda's real-life ship, the SS Winnipeg. 

Author photo by Lori Barra

Winner of the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, Allende explores the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, as pregnant young widow Roser flees Franco's Spain with Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her dead husband. They enter a marriage of convenience to survive, boarding the SS Winnipeg for Chile—"the long petal of sea and wine and snow," as Pablo Neruda called it—as they learn what being in exile really means.

Spanning from 1938 to 1994, this majestic novel from Allende (In the Midst of Winter) focuses on Victor Dalmau, a 23-year-old medical student fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side when the novel opens. After Nationalist forces prevail, Victor and thousands of other Republican sympathizers flee Spain to avoid brutal reprisals. In France, he searches the packed refugee camps for Roser Bruguera, who is pregnant with his brother Guillem's child. Once he finds Roser, he breaks the news that Guillem has died in battle and that he has won a place on the Winnipeg, a ship that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has organized to transport Spanish refugees from Europe, where WWII is breaking out, to safety in Chile. Allowed to bring only family with him, Victor persuades Roser to marry him in name only. Though Victor has a brief, secret affair with well-off Ofelia del Solar, he begins to fall in love with Roser; they raise Roser's son, Marcel, together and build stable lives, he as a cardiologist and she as a widely respected musician. But when the Pinochet dictatorship unseats Chile's Marxist president in 1973, they find themselves once more endangered by their political views. Allende's assured prose vividly evokes her fictional characters, historical figures like Neruda, and decades of complex international history; her imagery makes the suffering of war and displacement palpable yet also does justice to human strength, hope and rebirth. Seamlessly juxtaposing exile with homecoming, otherness with belonging, and tyranny with freedom, the novel feels both timeless and perfectly timed for today. (Jan.)