Comments   Summary   Author Notes

Summary: Álvarez's celebrated new novel takes us into the worlds of two women swept up in campaigns against the scourges of their day: Alma, a Latin American novelist relocated to the United States, who is having writer's block while writing her new bestselling family sagas, and Isabel's story many years before. A brilliant novel-within-a-novel, Para salvar al mundo pits ambition against altruism and, in the process, tells the radiant stories of two courageous women.While writing her novel, Alma is sidetracked by the story of a much earlier idealist, Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he needed living "carriers" of the vaccine; otherwise, the vaccine would not survive the travel time across the ocean. Enter Isabel Sendales y Gómez, director of La Casa de Expositós. Isabel selects twenty-two orphan boys to be the carriers and joins them on the voyage to the colonies. Her bravery inspires a very different novel from Alma.