Malva

Hagar Peeters, a prize-winning Dutch poet, gives voice to Pablo Neruda's only daughter, Malva, who was abandoned with a deformity in a Dutch orphanage where she died at the age of eight during WWII. Malva tries to discover how Neruda, the flawless hero who stood up for the forgotten and downtrodden, could deny her existence and how his many biographers could write her out of history. Only in death can she share her story through her chosen ghostwriter, Peeters, whose own father was a journalist in Chile when Neruda died. Witty and profound, Malva is a journey backward through history, seeing Neruda's mysterious death in detail and the moments that defined him through his daughter's eyes. In her omniscient perspective, Malva is accompanied by other forgotten children - for example, Lucia, the schizophrenic daughter of James Joyce - as she tells her father of her small but not insignificant life. The magical realism of Malva transports readers from South America to a world of grace, poetry and profound beauty.