Isabel Allende writes novels that mix real history with magic, most famously The House of the Spirits, inspired by her own family in Chile. Every January 8, wherever she is, she arrives alone at her office at dawn, lights candles, and writes the first sentence in what she calls a trance, a ritual she has kept every year since it produced that first novel in 1981. She then spends ten or twelve hours a day alone in a room writing straight onto her computer with no outline, carrying a notebook everywhere to catch overheard stories and clipped newspaper articles. She was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, was related to Chile's president Salvador Allende, and fled to Venezuela in 1975 after a violent military coup, working as a journalist and raising her children there before publishing her first novel at nearly forty. She now lives and writes in Northern California, and her books have sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.