(He was Rosa's fiance, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen-has summoned-to be her husband Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life. At the age of 35, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities-she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future.

We begin-at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country-in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara Del Valle. The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family-their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes a destiny and overtakes them all. 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 Trueba family's passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. Chilean writer Isabel Allende's classic novel is both a symbolic family saga and the story of an unnamed Latin American country's turbulent history.

Isabel allende's daughter paula