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Lovers at the Museum is a sparkling and magical novella by one of my favorite Latin American authors, Isabel Allende, since the publication of her first book The House of Spirits in 1982. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Allende with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

”A night watchman found the lovers sleeping in a knot of arms, legs, and tulle, enveloped in the foam of a ruined wedding gown in one of the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He discovered them directly in front of a vast mural named Rising Sea. . . .��

And so begins the story of two passionate souls who spend a magical night that defies all logical explanation how they escaped detection by the motion sensors and sophisticated alarm system throughout the museum as well as the nightly patrols of the guards at the Guggenheim Museum. But although it defied logic, the runaway bride, Bibina Aranda, wakes up in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao still wearing her wedding dress and draped in the arms of a naked man, Indar Zubieta. This couple attempts to explain to the authorities how their meeting one another was love at first sight. After meeting one another in a bar where Bibina had fled as she ran away from her wedding, they were falling in love. Later while walking without an umbrella, they gently pushed on the museum doors allowing them entrance to escape the rain. Bibina tells Inspector Larramendi that the museum is enchanted as she explains that like butterflies she and her lover fluttered through the galleries and breezed in and out of the paintings, and we drank in the colors and got lost in the labyrinth and danced with the sculptures. This is a book that will leave you light-hearted and smiling. We all need a little magic in our world.