The unforgettable first novel (1982) that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted & imaginative storytellers—now available for the first time as an ebook.The House of the Spiritsbrings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. 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. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.One of the most important novels of the twentieth century,The House of the Spiritsis an enthralling epic that spans decades & lives, weaving the personal & the political into a universal story of love, magic, & fate.°°°“Talk about an ambitious debut. Allende embarked on the monumental task of retelling a fictionalized version of her family story, encapsulating the recent history of Chile at the time, and did it in a voice that paid homage to the greats that preceded her in the Latin American boom of the 1960s and ’70s but made it all her own, and unapologetically so. This is perhaps the book that taught me the most when I was in the thick of writing Freedom Is a Feast. I was worried that I was taking on too much: Chávez, revolution, family. The House of Spirits led the way for me in how to marry the political and the personal, and it showed me that a debut novel could be big, and epic, and loud.”— Alejandro Puyana,World Literature Today°°°Isabel Allende, born in Peru & raised in Chile, is a novelist, feminist, & philanthropist. She is one of the most widely read authors in the world.