The House Of The Spirits

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Description

Chilean writer Isabel Allende's classic bestseller is a richly symbolic family saga that is also the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country's turbulent history. In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colourful and all-too-human inhabitants - the Trueba family, whose passions, struggles and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change. Against a backdrop of revolution and counter-revolution, Allende portrays a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring that the polictial allegiances that set them at odds.

Reviews

The amazing Isabel Allende, the niece of Chile's ousted President Salvador Allende, is creating the kind of literary sensation most writers only dream of. And "The House of the Spirits" is no ordinary first novel. It is an exotic vision - a brilliant, impassioned epic - and a personal coup for the young journalist who "had to write it."

The book seemed to come from nowhere: a first novel by a forty two-year-old Chilean journalist that has dazzled readers throughout Europe and Latin America, making its author the most unexpected sensation since the emergence of Gabriel Garcia Mrquez.

An extraordinary debut, The House of the Spirits marks the appearance of a major international writer.
Rarely has a first novel catapulted a writer so suddenly to international attention and acclaim as The House of the Spirits. The author, Isabel Allende, is niece of former Chilean president, Salvador Allende Gossens; yet she was totally unknown to the world at large until the events of last year.

With this spectacular first novel, Isabel Allende becomes the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists.
"The House of the Spirits" draws on this experience, though always in veiled terms. A meticulously detailed family saga spanning four generations, the novel is set in a mythified land of volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, peopled by characters who seem to derive their extravagance from their natural surroundings.

Author Bio

Isabel Allende was born in 1942 Lima, Peru. She grew up in Chile and now lives in California. She is the author of novels The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Paula, Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia, My Invented Country, Zorro, Ins of My Soul The Sum of Our Days and The Island Beneath the Sea.