The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) is Isabel Allende's first novel, published in Spanish in 1982 and in Magda Bogin's English translation in 1985. It follows three generations of the Trueba family across roughly half a century, in a country that is never named but plainly resembles Chile.

Esteban Trueba, a proud and violent man determined to restore his family's fortune, rebuilds the Tres Marías estate and rises to become a conservative senator. He marries Clara del Valle, a clairvoyant and unworldly woman who communicates with spirits and keeps the household's strange, warm center. Their daughter Blanca's love affair with Pedro Tercero García, a peasant songwriter and organizer, defies everything Esteban stands for, and it produces Alba, the granddaughter through whom the story is finally told.

The book blends magical realism with family drama and political history. Its private feuds and loves unfold against land reform, class conflict and the coup that overthrows a socialist government, and the last part turns to repression and its cost. Allende has said her grandparents were the models for Esteban and Clara. It was adapted as a 1993 film directed by Bille August, and is the first-published book of what she calls her involuntary trilogy, with Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia.