WITH A FAMILY LIFE such as hers, it's easy to see why Isabel Allende's new book is a memoir: there are enough fantastical characters and high drama here to furnish the plots of several novels. At the more outlandish end of the scale we have drug addiction, organ trafficking, assassination and witchcraft; on a more mundane level bankruptcy, politics, professional success and failure; and on a human level infidelity, death, loss, love, birth, artificial insemination, faith, fantasy and a mail order bride - and that's not even the half of it.

Throughout it all, permeating every aspect of Allende's existence drifts the ghost of her late daughter, Paula. Indeed, this book picks up where her last autobiographical work ended, with Paula's death in 1992 from tragic complications relating to a hereditary condition, porphyria. Through conversations with Paula, and with Paula always in mind, Allende shares the experiences of belonging to - and presiding over - a sprawling, peculiar, imperfect and yet ultimately loving group of friends and relations. In every line and every page, Allende shows us something of human nature, with all its passions, perversions and permutations.

In many ways, this is a 300-page act of emotional displacement - albeit an eloquent, elegant literary act of displacement. There is no way that Allende could have been reasonably expected to produce a work of fiction when, after the death of her child, real life assumed the dramatic proportions of a novel. Allende has lived the nightmare that every mother dreads, and no reader should approach The Sum of Our Days expecting to find a neat resolution to that aching, gaping void.

It is as though by distracting us with the at times tragic, at times uplifting, at times simply hugely entertaining shenanigans of her family life, we - and she - might somehow lay to rest the ghost of Paula. But for all Allende fixes her gaze outwards, on to the people and events surrounding her, she cannot conceal what is really in her heart, and for that the reader (or at least this reader) has to love her.

That is not to say that, like all great matriarchs, she cannot also be extremely enervating - she admits it roughly halfway through the book, when her desire to help turns into interference, and a future daughter-in-law is compelled to read her the riot act. Allende's account of her Machiavellian attempts to manipulate the new arrival is wonderfully honest and frank - for all her controlling tendencies she has enviable self-knowledge. Which is why I know she won't be too offended when I say that there are times when this book feels a little like being stuck in a lift with someone who, while utterly lovely and adorable, hasn't a clue when to stop talking - and who doesn't hold much truck with the usual boundaries of human interaction.

The narrative comes at you in a machinegun fire of events, unfolding at a breakneck pace: it seems there really is never a dull moment at Casa Allende. This clan of hers, an extended tribe of children, grandchildren, lovers, friends and parents over whom she presides, are in themselves a force to be reckoned with. Compared with our cold, northern European model of the family, it's a welcome, warm front of love, where happiness is shared and suffering divided - all suffused with benign elements of the supernatural. When one of the grandchildren, also a carrier of the condition that killed Paula, ends up in hospital with pneumonia, the nurse engaged with placing a drip in her arm takes one look at the assembled might of the Allende tribe and says: “Please, just don't chant.” I laughed in solidarity at that one.

Along with loss, love is the other central theme of this book. Implicit throughout is the idea that love is a sacred ideal, and that almost anything is permissible in its name. It is this belief that enables Allende to accept the lesbian partnership that devastates her son's life, or embrace unconditionally the idiosyncrasies of those dearest to her heart. But when all is said and done, no amount of dramatic acrobatics can outdo the absolute core of Allende's talent: her gift for writing. She can bring even the most inert subjects to life, breathing vitality into them through her prose; if only books were people, her beloved daughter Paula would once again be alive and well.

The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende
Fourth Estate, £17.99; 320pp

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