Island Beneath the Sea begins among the volatile sugar plantations of Saint Dominigue in the years preceding the Haitian Revolution and moves to the emerging society of a nineteenth-century New Orleans. Zarité, a mulatta woman born of an African mother and white father, fights to take control of her own life despite being born into slavery. But the man who really controls her fate is Toulouse Valmorain, a young French heir recently arrived on the island to assume ownership of his father’s plantation. Valmorain quickly learns that plantation life is not so easy to reconcile with his drawing-room idealism – and much tougher than he imagined. Valmorain and Zarité’s lives gradually become intertwined and when the pair are forced to flee the plantation together, the boundaries of their relationship shift and set their lives on a new path together.

Isabel Allende’s latest offering is the story of a slave attempting to maintain her own humanity despite the inhumanity that surrounds her, and to believe in love, in the face of all evidence her belief is futile.