Isabel Allende was born in 1942 Lima, Peru. She grew up in Chile and now lives in California. She is the author of novels The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Paula, Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia, My Invented Country, Zorro, Ines of My Soul The Sum of Our Days and The Island Beneath the Sea. Chilean novelist Isabel Allende was a journalist for many years. She began to write fiction in 1981. The result was the worldwide best-seller The House of the Spirits, which was followed by the equally successful Of Love and Shadows and The Stories of Eva Luna (Penguin 1991). Her first work of non-fiction, Paula, was published in 1995 and is a harrowing chronicle of the death of her daughter. Isabel Allende lives in California.