Isabel Allende Returns to the World of The House of the Spirits

Chilean writer Isabel Allende won the 2026 Premio Planeta in Barcelona on Thursday, October 15. The prize, worth one million euros in its 75th edition, went to her new novel, La hora antes del alba (The Hour Before Dawn), which continues the story of the Trueba family forty-four years after The House of the Spirits. At 84, Allende has returned to the world of the first novel that made her one of the most widely read authors writing in Spanish. "It's like winning the Nobel," she told reporters after the ceremony, according to Reuters.

The House of the Spirits was published in 1982. It begins with the lives of several generations of one family and gradually becomes bound up with Chile's social and political upheavals. Allende drew on family memories, women's oral stories and elements of magical realism to tell a history in which political violence and class conflict enter people's private lives. The 1973 military coup and the repression that followed change the characters' fates in the last part of the novel.

Allende's own life was closely bound to this history. Her father, Tomás Allende, was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, the Chilean president overthrown in Augusto Pinochet's military coup. Isabel Allende left Chile in 1975 for Venezuela, and the experience of exile runs through much of her later work, from Of Love and Shadows to Paula. At the ceremony she said she again feels the fear that drove her out of Chile after the coup, and, according to Reuters, she linked the novel's timing to rising authoritarianism, saying the topic is "in the air".

The central character of the new novel is Alba Trueba, granddaughter of Clara and Esteban Trueba, the young woman who at the end of The House of the Spirits had been imprisoned and tortured by the military regime. According to the publisher's official description on the Planeta website, in a country darkened by dictatorship Alba is left alone after her grandfather's death, waiting for her first love without knowing whether he has survived or will come back for her. She feels safe in the great family house that keeps the memory of the absent, but her former captor lurks at her door, set on revenge: she must pay for her grandfather's sins. Allende says years of readers' questions about Alba's fate led her to write the book.

The House of the Spirits traces the transmission of memory and experience across generations. The new novel, at least on the basis of what has so far been revealed of its story, raises a different question: how can a survivor of violence go on living?

Continuing a story that has lived in readers' memories for more than four decades is also a literary challenge for Allende. The House of the Spirits draws on the tradition of the family saga while remaining deeply rooted in Latin America's political history. The new novel must establish its own narrative identity while facing the same characters and memories.

The Premio Planeta is one of Spain's best-known literary prizes, and Reuters notes that it has often drawn criticism for a selection process that critics say favours established authors. For Allende the prize also means a change of publisher. After more than four decades with Plaza & Janés, part of Penguin Random House, she has joined the Planeta group, which also organises and funds the prize. She entered under the pen name Luz Ventura with a manuscript titled Los que faltan. A record 1,424 novels were submitted this year, and second place, with 200,000 euros, went to Sergio Hernández for La añoranza.

According to the publisher, The Hour Before Dawn will be published on November 4, 2026, and until then any judgment of its literary worth, or of how well it continues The House of the Spirits, must wait. At the end of the first novel, Alba's future was unwritten. Forty-four years later, Allende returns to the point where Alba's story was left unfinished.

Sources: Planeta, official book page; Reuters, Mireia Merino (Oct. 16, 2026); The Guardian (Oct. 17, 2026; republished by UA.NEWS); EFE (Oct. 15, 2026; republished by El Diario de Hoy); 3Cat.