The Hacienda : My Venezuelan Years - Lisa St Aubin de Teran

The Hacienda is an extraordinary memoir from prize-winning novelist, Lisa St Aubin de Teran. At the age of seventeen she followed her husband, South American aristocrat and bank robber Don Jaime Teran, to his hacienda, deep in the Venezuelan Andes. Once there, Jaime virtually left his new bride to fend for herself on the vast sugar-cane and avocado plantation. The Hacienda tells the fascinating story of how, from half starving on a diet of mangoes and guavas and with two pedigree beagles, a pet vulture and one peasant girl for company, Lisa St Aubin de Teran became la Dona - managing the estate, bearing her first child, handling her increasingly unstable husband, and living for seven years amongst la gente, an illiterate, feudal people who she says "have been the greatest influence on my life and work."

"Over and over again before I ever went there, I heard the name `La Hacienda'. It was a place where sugar-cane grew in unimaginable abundance and avocado pears that dwarfed all others. When I asked where it was, I was told it was in the Andes, never anywhere specific, just en los Andes. when I asked how big it was, the answer was that it stretched as far as the eye could see and then further. Everything else I was told thereafter was woven in a tapestry of myth and history. Characters from the past were discussed and criticised with the same familiarity as the cousins who had just left the breakfast table. Time, it seemed, had warped on the hacienda and spun its web over all its sons and daughters. It spun its web over me."