SABEL ALLENDE does everything in Spanish - she dreams, cooks, yells at her beloved grandchildren when they're naughty and, of course, writes her bestselling books in her native language. "I even make love in Spanish. I would feel a fool panting in English," she says, greedily spooning the chocolatey froth off her cappuccino.
"It is decaffeinated, isn't it?" she asks the waitress in the London hotel in which she is staying on her British book tour. "If I have any more caffeine, I will be like this," impersonating a silken-clad jumping bean. "I am too much that way anyway."

She can say that again. Allende may be tiny but she packs a powerful, passionate punch, both in print and in person. She is, she alleges, a lipsticked Amazon who slays her own dragons.

Although she claims to be jet-lagged after flying from London to Barcelona, with her husband Willie Gordon - for the day for the city's Book Day, when everyone is given a book and a red rose - she looks wonderful. Gamine featured, with an enviably smooth, pale complexion and lively, watchful eyes the colour of dark chocolate, she is a fierce 65 years old, although she sure as hell doesn't look it. Which, knocking on wood, she attributes to good health and incontinent greed.

"I love dark coffee, wine, chocolate, caviar and vodka, rich, spicy food - everything that's bad for you. I don't stint myself."

Perhaps it's also something to do with living in California, among acupuncturists, earth mothers, vegetarian masseuses and spiritual crones who take workshops on how to become goddesses. Half the population is in recovery, the other half, she says, is into crystals, gurus, Tantric sex or saving whales.

Indeed, Allende herself relishes inhabiting a world of Jacuzzis, Zen sessions, consultations with Asian therapists and astrologers, and is a committed member of a women's mutual self-help group, The Sisters of Disorder.

Then there's her family. With a family like Allende's, who needs imagination? This is, after all, a Latin-American woman, the daughter of a diplomat, born in Peru and raised in Chile with a clairvoyant grandmother, who could make a table dance across a room, and a grandfather who once saw the green, cloven-hoofed Devil on a bus. Oh, and there was the aunt whose shoulder blades sprouted angel wings. ...continued