In 'The Hacienda,' the protagonist is trapped in a haunted house – and her marriage

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

After Mexico’s war for independence, a new bride finds herself alone in a haunted house surrounded by people who don't believe her. Isabel Cañas' debut novel The Hacienda blends romance, terror, and the supernatural to tell a story infused with Mexican culture. In a 2022 interview with Weekend Edition Sunday, Cañas told Ayesha Rascoe about the novel’s themes – colonialism, social status, the syncretism of Catholicism and indigenous practices – and her own fear of the dark.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. Of the big horror bad guy archetypes,
0:08.8	you know, monsters and murderers, the haunted house has always struck me as the one that really
0:14.8	strains credulity as a reader. I mean, if you're a character in a haunted house story, just don't go inside.
0:22.0	Or if you own the place, just get a realtor and move.
0:25.6	I don't know, something about it seems so not grounded in reality.
0:29.9	But in the 2022 book, The Haseenda, our hero is trapped in a haunted house because she's stuck in a marriage and she's got nowhere else to go, which is
0:38.4	something that's extremely relatable. Author Isabel Kanias spoke with the Empire's Asia Rosco about
0:43.8	why she's wanted to write a haunted house story ever since she was a kid. That's after the break.
0:50.1	This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe.
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1:00.8	Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. Tease and Cs apply.
1:06.5	Beatrice has limited options in her young life.
1:10.4	Her father, a general, was arrested after the Mexican War for Independence and executed. Her house burned to the ground. She and her mother make it out just in time. Unsympathetic relatives take them in. So when the chance comes to marry a handsome rich man, Beatrice jumps. But she never
1:30.2	asked what really happened to his first wife. Rookie mistake. That's how the action starts in the
1:37.7	hacienda and it just doesn't stop. This is Isabel Kanye's debut, and she joins us now to talk about it. Welcome.
1:47.0	Thank you so much for having me, Aisha. Let's talk about this. It's not just the fate of the first
1:53.9	wife that she should have asked some more questions about, but there are problems evident from
2:00.1	the moment Beatrice arrives at Rudolfo's estate and
2:05.9	Rudolfo is the husband. What does she see when she gets there? So when Beatrice arrives at
2:12.4	Asiand de San Isidro, Rodolfo soon goes back to Mexico City to work because he's a politician and she's there alone
2:18.2	and she quickly discovers that this place is profoundly haunted. But nobody seems to believe her.
2:25.4	No. She's kind of gaslit by the other people who live on the Ascienda who seem very afraid of
	...

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