Clara: The mysterious matriarch, who foretells family tragedy and shapes the destinies of the house of the Trueba's.Esteban: The patriarch, a hot-blooded and proud man whose hunger for land is legendary and who is haunted by his despotic passion for his wife he can never completely possess.When Esteban Trueba dies, his grand daughter Alba decides to write down the family story. He promises to make sure they will be able to live together. Blanca asks Pedro to step up for him, which results in Esteban's liberation. Socialists grab power in the country and senator Esteban's workers occupy the estate and keep their manager hostage. Pedro flees when Esteban wants to kill his daughter's aficionado.

To add to the tragedy, Pedro and the other workers turn themselves against their patron, while Esteban also discovers that Blanca is pregnant, with Pedro being the father. Esteban's sister Farula dies as well and he is hurt himself in an earthquake.

Clara gives birth to a twin (Nicholas and Jaime) while on the same day discovering that her parents have died in a car accident. Here, Blanca and Pedro Tercero García ( foreman on the estate) become friends and fall in love. Daughter Blanca is born after which they move to the Trueba estate. She has not spoken a single word since her sister's funeral, but now this all changes and they marry. After a few years, Esteban visits the Del Valle family and falls for Clara. Rosa's fiancé Esteban Trueba gives up his work when Rosa dies of poisoning and rebuilds the family estate into a perfectly run company. Rosa and Clara are two remarkable daughters of the Del Valle family, because of Rosa's astonishing beauty and Clara's power to move things without touching them and to call spirits. Isabel Allende Short outline of the story 'The wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do' The book also gives an outline of the Chilean political evolution in the 20th century. Like many of the great South American writers, Allende makes use of symbolism all the time. It plays in Chile (although the country is unnamed in the book) from the early 20th century to the 1970's. The House of the Spirits (translated from La casa de los espíritus) is a family story of multiple generations. 'With this spectacular first novel, Isabel Allende becomes the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists.'

La casa degli spiriti by Isabel Allende