Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende was a journalist in Chile until the 1973 coup, in which her father's cousin Salvador Allende died, and she fled to Venezuela. The House of the Spirits began as a letter to her dying grandfather and became the novel that made her the most widely read Spanish-language author alive. She writes a book a year, always starting on 8 January, and has sold something over seventy million copies. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
Movies (1)
Books (21)
- El amante japonés (2000)
- Largo pétalo de mar (2019)
- La isla bajo el mar (2009)
- Inés del alma mía (2006)
- El Zorro (2005)
- El bosque de los pigmeos (2004)
- Mi país inventado (2003)
- La ciudad de las bestias (2002)
- Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--Gold Level (2002)
- Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--World Literature (2001)
- Hija de la fortuna (2000)
- Retrato en sepia (2000)
- Eva Luna (1998)
- Afrodita (1997)
- 10 relatos de amor (1995)
- Prentice Hall Literature -- Gold (1994)
- La casa de los espíritus (1994)
- Paula (1994)
- El plan infinito (1992)
- De amor y de sombra (1984)
- Cuentos de Eva Luna
Where to start with Isabel Allende
La casa de los espíritus is the essential one, three generations of a Chilean family arriving at the coup. De amor y de sombra and Eva Luna are the other early novels. Paula is the memoir written at her daughter's bedside and the hardest thing she has published, and La ciudad de las bestias opens the trilogy for younger readers.
The early novels
The books that made her reputation, all published in the decade after she fled Chile. The House of the Spirits began as a letter to her dying grandfather and is still the one to read first.
The historical novels
The later and larger books, mostly built around a specific historical moment: the California gold rush, the Haitian revolution, the Spanish Civil War refugees who sailed to Chile in 1939.
The memoirs
Paula was written at her daughter's hospital bedside over a year of illness and is the hardest thing she has published. The other two are considerably lighter, one of them substantially about food.