The House of the Spirits (Everyman's Library)

Chilean writer Isabel Allende's classic bestseller is a richly symbolic family saga that is also the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country's turbulent history. In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colourful and all-too-human inhabitants - the Trueba family, whose passions, struggles and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change. Against a backdrop of revolution and counter-revolution, Allende portrays a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring that the polictial allegiances that set them at odds.