A richly embroidered, ambitious tale, Allende's latest novel charts one man's spiritual progress against five decades of history and cultural change. Allende relies less on her customary magical realism than on concrete, often graphic details in her first attempt to depict North American characters and settings. Greg Reeves, the son of an itinerant preacher who claims that life is governed by an infinite plan, spends the latter part of his childhood in the L.A. neighbourhood where his family settled when their father became ill. His best friend and soulmate there is Carmen Morales, the daughter of a hospitable Latino family. The novel follows Greg and, to a lesser extent, Carmen through turbulent experiences as each searches for identity. Greg discovers several different kinds of racial discrimination in the crowded neighbourhood; later, he taps into the social and sexual revolution in Berkeley; and he suffers through the crucible of Vietnam, from which he emerges determined to become rich and powerful no matter the cost in morality or peace of mind. He enters into disastrous marriages with two beautiful women, both of whom, he belatedly realizes, resemble his passive, remote mother; he also fails as a father.
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East, as her peripatetic family followed her stepfather's diplomatic career. She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup. Afterwards Allende fled her home and settled in Venezuela with her husband, son and daughter. She now lives in the San Francisco area with her American husband and their respective extended families.
Isabel Allende took the literary world by storm with the publication of "The House of the Spirits", a novel which chronicled four generations of a Chilean family against the backdrop of Chile's brutal history. The Times of London heralded Allende as having "the rare ability to blend fantasy and legend with political fact and a well-plotted narrative to produce an enchanted world unlike anything else in contemporary fiction." The New York Times called the book "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America."
“The world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”, Isabel Allende is now synonymous with the spiritual universe ofLatin America. A writer who has invested so much fantasy and imagination to narrate and describe the inimitable beauty of a continent that still remains an indecipherable enigma to the Western civilization, she has enchanted a couple of generations of readers. “The House of the Spirits” (1982) is a pivotal literary work, a chronology of one of the most mesmerizing family epics that aesthetically fuses the political, the sentimental and the transcendental. Isabel Allende was awarded the most prestigious literary prize of Chile, her native country, - Chilean National Prize for Literature. With the 18 published novels translated into more than 30 languages, her talent has marked indelibly the artistic world of the past 30 years.
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