Banned Books Week

New York Times bestseller.

In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future. "The House of the Spirits" is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.

International bestseller and much admired classic of American literature, the novel by Isabel Allende transcendental tells the epic story of the large and turbulent Trueba family in Chile, with its distressed patriarch and his clairvoyant women, tracing their lives from the late nineteenth century, to the violent days of the coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973. In The House of the Spirits, Allende blends the supernatural with reality in a highly personal version of magical realism. Rarely, the case in which a first novel launches its author as suddenly the international forum.