The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. The House of the Spirits, the unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. Our Shared Shelf, Emma Watson Goodreads Book Club Pick November/December 2020! The House of the Spirits with its all-informing, generous, and humane sensibility, is a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America.” -The New York Times Book Review Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds.“Spectacular.An absorbing and distinguished work.

The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Isabel Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants including Esteban, the patriarch, a volatile and proud man whose lust for land is legendary and who is haunted by tyrannical passion for the wife he can never completely posses Clara, the matriarch, elusive and mysterious, who foretells family tragedy and shapes the fortunes of the house and the Truebas Blanca, their daughter, soft-spoken yet rebellious, whose shocking love for the son of her father’s foreman fuels Esteban’s everlasting contempt, even as it produces the grandchild he adores and Alba, the fruit of Blanca’s forbidden love, a luminous beauty and a fiery and willful woman. The astonishing debut of a gifted storyteller, The House of the Spirits is both a symbolic family saga and the story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history. Int'l Women's Conference - México, 2013.Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Ceremony, 2017.

The house of the spirits book