The House of the Spirits [Hardcover]

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and 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 colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. 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.The House of the Spiritsnot only brings another nation’s history thrillingly to life, but also makes its people’s joys and anguishes wholly our own."Extraordinary... Powerful... Sharply observant, witty and eloquent."
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,The New York Times

"Nothing short of astonishing... InThe House Of The SpiritsIsabelle Allende has indeed shown us the relationships between past and present, family and nation, city and country, spiritual and political values. She has done so with enormous imagination, sensitivity, and compassion."
—Jane Futcher,San Francisco Chronicle

"Spectacular . . . A unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America."
—The New York Times Book Review

"That rarest of successes–a book about one family and one country that is a book about the world and becomes the world in a book."
—Cosmopolitan

"The only causeThe House of the Spiritsembraces is that of humanity, and it does so with such passiol‡