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Daughter of Fortune

by Isabel Allende

Book 1 in the The House of the Spirits Trilogy series.

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Valparaíso, 1843. Eliza Sommers has been raised inside the protected British household of her adoptive family, but her attachment to the impoverished Joaquín Andieta draws her beyond the expectations imposed on a respectable young woman. When Joaquín leaves Chile for the California goldfields, Eliza secretly follows him.

Aided by the Chinese physician Tao Chi’en, she crosses a rapidly changing frontier of miners, traders, immigrants and fugitives. Her search for Joaquín gradually becomes a search for independence, linking nineteenth-century Chile to the California Gold Rush while showing how migration can loosen family, class and gender constraints.