It is no accident that Isabel Allende has sold 51 million books in 30 languages. She has changed the literary landscape with discipline, an inexhaustible imagination and criminal levels of charm; her oeuvre is aphrodisiacal, as panoptic in scope as the most beguiling of love affairs. To read her work is to resign from the quotidian.

There is nothing ordinary about Allende's worlds, however ardently they may depict the everyday; whether writing about her own life, that of historical figures, or those of characters (her own and others), she imparts a sense of magisterial frivolity. And this, the latest of her 16 books, is no different, documenting the births and deaths, weddings and divorces, unions and reunions, abuses and shifting land mass of Allende's half-American family.

It begins in 1993 - where Paula, the memoir Allende wrote for her comatose and now 16 years deceased daughter, ends - and threads through the intervening years. 'I am a born liar,' she states, 'so fiction is my territory ... Then, why tackle a memoir? I want to remember. If I don't write it, I forget, and then it is as if it never happened; by recording my life I can live twice.'

Drawing on the daily letters she has written to her 'immortal' mother for more than three decades, Allende is confronted by a serious complication: her second husband's family has no interest in being exposed. Forced to rein in her rich descriptive prowess and genius for observation, she reasons that there 'is no lack of drama in my life. I have more than enough three-ring circus material for writing.'

William C. Gordon, a disastrous father, reformed womaniser, idealistic former lawyer and now a published novelist, has been Allende's partner since 1988, and his family is tied to Allende's by an astonishingly complex web of relationships.

Despite profuse and elegantly worded bursts of praise, Allende's feelings for 'Willie' seem uncertain; he's emotionally brutal towards his five children ('Stop acting like a pansy,' is his response to his sons' emotional conflicts), he then grieves for their traumatised souls. Broken by heroin and prostitution, his only daughter abandons her critically ill premature daughter in hospital before vanishing; she is presumed dead.

'If she were my daughter,' Allende notes after visiting her in jail, 'I would move heaven and earth to save her.'

'She isn't your daughter,' he replies, 'with a kind of mute resentment.'

Allende doesn't spare her husband in The Sum of Our Days, nor does she exonerate him from his obligation to remember, but this punitive - if justified - righteousness sits uneasily with her protestations of spiritual passion ('Willie told me that I was his soul, that he had waited for me and looked for me the first fifty years of his life, sure that before he died he would find me ... Only with you had I felt that we were a single spirit in barely separated bodies. Now I feel that with Willie.').

But does she really love him as she loved her daughter, or is she just too emotionally exhausted to begin again?

'You always said that I'm entertaining and that no one would ever get bored with me,' Allende writes, addressing Paula, 'but that was then. After I lost you, I also lost my desire to be the life of the party. I've become introverted; you wouldn't recognise me.'

She rallies though, and can shake that sadness off like water.

Ultimately, The Sum of Our Days is a riveting work, as affecting and effortlessly sensual as Allende's finest works, if peripherally coloured by conscious or reflexive self-deception. Her deep absorption of, and reaction to, the world and its dimensional interplay - light, colour, sound, texture, temperature - amounts to the purest symphony of being.