A casa dos espiritos

International bestseller and much admired classic of American literature, the novel by Isabel Allende transcendental tells the epic story of the large and turbulent Trueba family in Chile, with its distressed patriarch and his clairvoyant women, tracing their lives from the late nineteenth century, to the violent days of the coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973. In The House of the Spirits, Allende blends the supernatural with reality in a highly personal version of magical realism. Rarely, the case in which a first novel launches its author as suddenly the international forum.