On January 8, 1981, journalist and former television host Isabel Allende, a Chilean political exile, sat down in Venezuela to write a letter to her nearly 100-year-old grandfather in an attempt to bridge the distance between her present and her family’s past. She began with an anecdote he had told her when she was a child, about his fiancée, Rosa, who’d been mistakenly poisoned. As she wrote, she has explained elsewhere, “other characters stepped in,” and the unsent letter grew into the manuscript of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, in which vibrant strands of magic realism heighten the color of a sweeping tapestry of romance, betrayal, revenge, social upheaval, and reconciliation.