A family saga where ghosts, love and history share one house.

Isabel Allende began The House of the Spirits as a letter to her grandfather in Chile, written from exile in Caracas. It grew into a novel that announced one of the most widely read Spanish language writers in the world.

Clara del Valle, who predicts the future and moves salt cellars with her mind, anchors a story that is joyful and devastating by turns. Allende gives as much weight to women's private lives as to the public upheavals around them.

The novel's final chapters, set during a brutal dictatorship, show how writing itself becomes resistance. More than four decades on, it remains a cornerstone of Latin American fiction.