The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits, published in Spanish as La casa de los espiritus, is the 1982 debut novel of Isabel Allende. Rejected by several Spanish-language publishers before being published in Barcelona in 1982, it became an instant best-seller, was critically acclaimed and catapulted Allende to literary stardom, and has since been translated into over twenty languages. First conceived when Allende received news that her hundred-year-old grandfather was dying, the novel details the life of the Trueba family across four generations, tracing the post-colonial social and political upheavals of Chile through two protagonists, Esteban and Alba, and incorporates elements of magical realism influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.