By Isabel Allende
 
From the highly acclaimed and best selling author of The House of Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva comes a new novel, her first to be set in the United States and to portray American characters. The Infinite Plan is a mesmorizing, poignant saga of one man's search for love and his struggle to come to terms with a childhood of poverty and neglect.
 
Gregory Reeves is the son of an artist and self-styled preacher who wanders through the American West with his family in a caravan during the 1940s, preaching a divine vision he has received of the meaning of life and the nature of the universe: The Infinite Plan. When the elder Reeves falls ill, the family is forced to abandon its nomadic ways and settle in a Hispanic barrio of Los Angeles. A new life begins here for Gregory: school (for the first time), gangs, sex, books and ideas, work--much of this in Spanish, a new language. As he explores the mysterious world of the barrio, he meets the people who will shape his future, among them Pedro and Immaculada Morales, who become his surrogate parents and provide him with the love and security his own family cannot give him; Carmen Morales, their daughter and Gregory's friend for life, who grows up to be an earthly woman who teaches him about love as well as friendship; Juan Jose Morales, their son and Gregory's buddy, whose experience in Vietnam will change the course of his family's and Gregory's lives; and Cyrus, the old Communist intellectual who feeds Gregory books and inspires him with a passion for social justice.
 
As Gregory's story unfolds, we follow his struggle to survive--persecution by the gangs in the barrio, the horrors of the war in Vietnam--and to be successful. A lawyer in San Francisco after he returns from the killing fields of Vietnam, Gregory pursues money and possessions, looks for love with the wrong women, parties, abuses alcohol, neglects his children, and loses himself in an illusory and wrongheaded quest. Eventually, after many false turns, Gregory's search for love and for his soul brings him full circle back to his roots and ahead to a new life with the nameless storyteller who is passing along to us the tale Gregory told her.
 
A novel rich in character and plot, classic in style, and epic in scope The Infinite Plan transforms one man's story into a powerful tale of loneliness and love, betrayals and hurdles and defeats that finally lead to acceptance and reconciliation. The consummate storyteller, Isabel Allende weaves a vivid, passionate, and engrossing tapestry of American life in a novel as irresistibly entertaining as any she has written.