Introducing... Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende

Introducing books through the first chapter or so...

A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure  my enemies were no longer looking for me. My Nini is paranoid, as the residents of the People's Independent Republic of Berkeley tend to be, persecuted as they are by the government and extraterrestrials, but in my case she wasn't exaggerating: no amount of precaution could ever be enough. She handed me a hundred-page notebook so I could keep a diary, as I did from the age of eight until I was fifteen, when my life went off the rails.

-- Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende