The House of the Spirits

Allende follows the Trueba family across four generations in an unnamed South American country closely modeled on her native Chile. Clara del Valle, who can move objects with her mind and predict the future, marries the volatile landowner Esteban Trueba after the early death of her sister Rosa, whom Esteban had first courted, and the two build an uneasy household on his hacienda, Las Tres Marias, that Esteban rules with a temper that spills into violence against his workers and eventually his own family. Their daughter Blanca falls in love with Pedro Tercero Garcia, the son of Esteban's foreman, and after years of a hidden affair gives birth to Alba while married off to a French count she quickly leaves. As the country moves from an elected socialist government toward a military coup that Esteban himself helped bring about, Alba grows into a young activist who is arrested, tortured, and raped in the new regime's prisons by Esteban Garcia, Esteban's own illegitimate grandson turned secret policeman, using the family's cruelty from an earlier generation as the instrument of the family's punishment in this one. Esteban, aged and broken by what his politics helped unleash, works his remaining influence to get Alba freed, and the novel ends with the two of them reconciled, Esteban dying peacefully in her arms while Alba, pregnant by a man she may never be able to name for certain, resolves to write the family's whole story down rather than seek revenge for it.

Allende writes in a lush, generously detailed style shot through with Clara's matter of fact magic, ghosts, premonitions, and moving furniture treated with the same plain seriousness as a birth or a death, so the novel reads warmly and quickly even as its final chapters turn openly political and violent.