Zorro

Born Diego de la Vega in 1795 to the valiant hidalgo, Alejandro, and the beautiful Regina, the daughter of a Spanish deserter and an Indian shaman, our hero grows up in California before traveling to Spain. Raised alongside his wet nurse's son, Bernardo, Diego becomes friends for life with his "milk brother," despite the boys' class differences. Though born into privilege, Diego has deep ties to California's exploited natives—both through blood and friendship—that account for his abiding sense of justice and identification with the underdog. In Catalonia, these instincts as well as Diego's swordsmanship intrigue Manuel Escalante, a member of the secret society La Justicia. Escalante recruits Diego into the society, which is dedicated to fighting all forms of oppression, and thus begins Diego's construction of his dashing, secret alter ego, Zorro. With loyal Bernardo at his side, Zorro hones his fantastic skills, evolves into a noble hero and returns to California to reclaim his family's estate in a breathtaking duel. All the while, he encounters numerous historical figures, who anchor this incredible tale in a reality that enriches and contextualizes the Zorro myth.

Daughter of Fortune

Allende expands her geographical boundaries in this sprawling, engrossing historical novel flavored by four culturesAEnglish, Chilean, Chinese and AmericanAand set during the 1849 California Gold Rush. The alluring tale begins in Valpara!so, Chile, with young Eliza Sommers, who was left as a baby on the doorstep of wealthy British importers Miss Rose Sommers and her prim brother, Jeremy. Now a 16-year-old, and newly pregnant, Eliza decides to follow her lover, fiery clerk Joaqu!n Andieta, when he leaves for California to make his fortune in the gold rush. Enlisting the unlikely aid of Tao Chi'en, a Chinese shipboard cook, she stows away on a ship bound for San Francisco. Tao Chi'en's own storyArichly textured and expansively toldAbegins when he is born into a peasant family and sold into slavery, where it is his good fortune to be trained as a master of acupuncture. Years later, while tending to a sailor in colonial Hong Kong, he is shanghaied and forced into service at sea. During the voyage with Eliza, Tao nurses her through a miscarriage. When they disembark, Eliza is disguised as a boy, and she spends the next four years in male attire so she may travel freely and safely. Eliza's search for Joaqu!n (rumored to have become an outlaw) is disappointing, but through an eye-opening stint as a pianist in a traveling brothel and through her charged friendship with Tao, now a sought-after healer and champion of enslaved Chinese prostitutes, Eliza finds freedom, fulfillment and maturity. Effortlessly weaving in historical background, Allende (House of the Spirits; Paula) evokes in pungent prose the great melting pot of early California and the colorful societies of Valpara!so and Canton. A gallery of secondary characters, developed early on, prove pivotal to the plot. In a book of this scope, the narrative is inevitably top-heavy in spots, and the plot wears thin toward the end, but this is storytelling at its most seductive, a brash historical adventure.

City of the Beasts

When 15-year-old Alexander Cold is sent to stay with his eccentric, gruff grandmother, Kate, while his mother is being treated for cancer, he is more than a little reluctant to accompany Kate on a writing assignment in South America to search for a legendary nine-foot-tall "Beast." However, once the expedition down the Amazon begins, Alexander's doubts are pushed out of his mind by more immediate concerns, such as keeping an eye on two suspicious members of the party: a native named Karakawe and Mauro Cari as, a wealthy entrepreneur. After Alexander's mysterious encounter with a caged jaguar, another teen, Nadia, explains its importance to him, and begins calling Alexander "Jaguar." This marks the beginning of their somewhat surreal journey: the two teens are kidnapped by the "People of the Mist," a tribe possessing the power of turning invisible, and enter a mountain to discover the mythical city of El Dorado and the enigmatic "Beasts." Reluctant readers may be intimidated by the thickness of this volume, but the plot moves at a rapid pace, laced with surprises and ironic twists. The action and outcome seem preordained, cleverly crafted to deliver the moral, but many readers will find the author's formula successful with its environmentalist theme, a pinch of the grotesque and a larger dose of magic.

My Invented Country

The book circles around two life-changing moments. The assassination of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens on September 11, 1973, sent her into exile and transformed her into a literary writer. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on her adopted homeland, the United States, brought forth an overdue acknowledgment that Allende had indeed left home. My Invented Country, mimicking the workings of memory itself, ranges back and forth across that distance between past and present lives. It speaks compellingly to immigrants and to all of us who try to retain a coherent inner life in a world full of contradictions.

Paula

A magician with words, Allende makes this grim scenario into a wondrous encounter with the innermost sorrows and joys of another human being. In 1991, while living in Madrid with her husband, Paula was felled by porphyria, a rare blood disease, and, despite endless care by her mother and husband, lapsed into an irreversible coma. Her mother, as she watched by Paula's bedside, began to write this book, driven by a desperation to communicate with her unconscious daughter. She writes of her own Chilean childhood, the violent death of her uncle, Salvador Allende, and the family's flight to Venezuela from the oppressive Pinochet regime. Allende explores her relationship with her own mother, documented in the hundreds of letters they exchanged since she left home. Allende later married-and divorced-an undemanding and loyal man and became a fierce feminist, rebelling against the constraints of traditional Latin American society. Eventually, hope waning, Allende and her son-in-law take the comatose Paula to California, where the author lives with her second husband. The climactic scenes of Paula's death in the rambling old house by the Pacific Ocean seem to take place in another time and space. Only a writer of Allende's passion and skill could share her tragedy with her readers and leave them exhilarated and grateful.

Eva Luna

A woman makes love to an Indian dying of snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva"so she will love life." Thus begins Allende's latest novel, a magnificent successor to The House of the Spirits and Of Love & Shadows. Set in a Latin American country, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures. Brought up in the house of an eccentric doctor devoted to mummifying corpses, where her mother is a servant, Eva is left an orphan at six. Her black godmother, or madrina , leases her as a servant to a series of bizarre households of metaphorical significance, the last of which she leaves in grand style upon emptying a government Minister's chamberpot over his head. Interleaved with Eva's story is her account of a certain Rolf Carle, with whom her life will become linkedshe tells of his youth in Nazi Austria and young manhood as a filmmaker in South America. Through a series of improbable and felicitous coincidences, Eva is taken under the wing of such exotic benefactors as a street urchin who becomes a guerrilla leader, a colorful whorehouse Madam, a kindly Turkish merchant and a stunningly beautiful transsexual. Like the author, Eva is a prodigious fabulist, weaving extraordinary tales that change reality at will, making it, as she says, easier to bear. Although the fabulist's art is seen as dangerously escapist, Allende's wonderful novel, crammed with the strange and fantastical, the sensuous and the erotic, also speaks powerfully in the cause of freedom.

The House of the Spirits

On the day that the priest accused her of being possessed by the devil and that her Uncle Marcos's body was delivered to her house accompanied by a puppy, Barrabás, Clara del Valle began keeping a journal. Fifty years later, her husband Esteban and her granddaughter Alba refer to these journals as they piece together the story of their family. Clara is a young girl when Barrabás arrives at the del Valle house. Her favorite sister, Rosa the Beautiful, is engaged to Esteban Trueba. Clara is clairvoyant and is able to predict almost every event in her life. She is not able to change the future, only to see it. While Esteban is off in the mines trying to make his fortune, Rosa is accidentally poisoned in the place of her father, Severo del Valle. Rosa dies. Clara is so shocked by the events that she stops talking. Nine years later, Esteban has made a fortune with his family property, Tres Marias, thanks to his hard work and to his exploitation of the local peasants. On top of exploiting their labor, Esteban exploits all of the young girls of the peasant families, notably Pancha, for his sexual satisfaction. In addition to the peasant girls, Esteban also has sexual relations with prostitutes, including Transito Soto. Transito and Esteban become friends, and he lends her money to move to the city. Esteban's mother is about to die, and he returns to the city, where he pays a visit to the del Valle home. Esteban and Clara become engaged and marry. They move into the big house on the corner that Esteban built for them. Esteban's sister Ferula moves in with them.

About a year after they are married, Clara and Esteban's first child, Blanca, is born. When the family travels to Tres Marias for the summer a few years later, Blanca meets Pedro Tercero and they fall in love. Pedro Tercero is the son of Pedro Segundo, the peasant foreman of Tres Marias. Toward the end of the summer, Clara becomes pregnant again with twins, who she announces will be named Jaime and Nicolas. Days before the twins are due, Clara's parents are killed in a car accident. Rescuers are unable to find Nivea's head. No one wants to tell Clara that Nivea is buried headless, because they do not want to upset her just before the birth. Clara, however, realizes that her mother's head has not been found and makes Ferula go with her to find it. As soon as she recovers her mother's head, Clara goes into labor. Over the years, Ferula and Clara have developed a deep friendship. Ferula's feelings for Clara border on passionate love, and she and Esteban develop a rivalry over Clara's affections. One morning, Esteban comes home unexpectedly and finds Ferula in Clara's bed. Esteban kicks Ferula out of the house. As she leaves, Ferula curses Esteban to eternal loneliness.

Blanca and Pedro Tercero's love grows as they mature, and they soon realize that Esteban would disapprove if he knew. In addition to their being of different classes, Pedro Tercero is a revolutionary, while Esteban is a conservative. Blanca and Pedro Tercero continue their romance in secret. Several years later, they are exposed to Esteban by Jean de Satigny, who is trying to ingratiate himself with Esteban so he can become either his business partner or his son-in-law. Esteban makes Blanca leave Tres Marias and tries to kill Pedro Tercero. In his anger, Esteban hits Clara. She never talks to him again. For several years although they live in the same house, they almost never see each other. Jaime and Nicolas finish boarding school and return home. Jaime studies medicine and Nicolas dabbles in spirituality and inventing. Esteban becomes very involved in the Conservative party, runs for Senate, and is elected. Esteban and Clara eventually return to a civil, if silent, relationship. A few years later, Blanca gets pregnant. Esteban tells her that he has killed Pedro Tercero and forces her to marry Jean de Satigny. About six months after they are married, Blanca discovers Jean de Satigny's unusual sexual practices and leaves him. She gives birth to her daughter Alba as soon as she arrives home at the big house on the corner. Miguel, the younger brother of a friend and lover of Nicolas and Jaime, watches Alba's birth from a closet. According to Clara, Alba is born lucky. She is raised by her entire family, inspiring great love in all. She is the only member of the family to develop a close and loving relationship with Esteban. Although she thinks that Jean de Satigny is her father and that he is dead, Alba meets Pedro Tercero and establishes a friendship with him. To the great sadness of everyone but herself, Clara dies. When she is eighteen, Alba enters the university where she meets Miguel, and they fall in love. Miguel is a revolutionary. They participate in some of the growing number of anti-conservative protests that are springing up around the country. To everyone's surprise, the socialists win the elections. Pedro Tercero joins the government. The peasants take over Tres Marias. Esteban tries to stop them and is taken hostage. At Blanca's request, Pedro Tercero intervenes and saves Esteban. Esteban and the conservatives do all they can to discredit the socialists, including preparing to a military coup. A few months later, there is a military coup. Jaime, who is friends with the Socialist president, is killed. Miguel joins the guerrillas, and Pedro Tercero goes into hiding in the big house on the corner. Esteban is at first pleases with the coup but soon realizes that it results not in the conservatives' return to power, but in the establishment of a military dictatorship. He is powerless to do much other than to help Blanca and Pedro Tercero escape to Canada. The colonel at the head of the dictatorship abducts Alba. He turns out to be Esteban Garcia, Pancha and Esteban Trueba's grandson. Before she died Pancha told Esteban the story of his ancestry. Esteban slowly made his way up the ranks of the military, in the process acquainted himself with Esteban Trueba and his family, especially Alba. Under the guise of finding out where Miguel is, Esteban Garcia exacts revenge on Alba for his grandmother's mistreatment. Desperate to find Alba, Esteban turns to Transito Soto, who runs the Christopher Columbus, a brothel-turned-hotel. Thanks to the connections she has established through her sex work, Transito is able to repay the favor Esteban did for her years before, and she assures that Alba is returned home. Alba and Esteban have just begun to write the story of their family when Esteban dies. Alba carries forth the project, pregnant with a child who's father is either Miguel or one of the men who raped her while she was in detention.