Overview

Following a successful career as an award-winning, best-selling novelist, in 2004 Lisa St Aubin de Teran retreated to a remote village in northern Mozambique. There she found her own African roots, founded a charity, and confronted new challenges. Much has been written about her life and escapades with a trio of Venezuelan exiles, life on an Andean hacienda, her return to literary fame, and two decades living in a crumbling Umbrian palace. But despite all the media hype about her, she managed to hide much of her actual life. Now, like the Japanese art of kintsugi, in this new memoir Lisa puts the shattered pieces of her life back together, filling in many of the dramatic, and often scandalous, gaps. While her life has been said to be stranger than fiction, it is fiction that has kept her afloat. This autobiography sets the record straight and shows a writer who for over half a century has enjoyed following her dreams, even when those dreams outdistanced her reach.

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9781914278129

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"""Lisa St Aubin de Teran writes with extraordinary vividness and clarity... She faces reality with a courage and skill that left me not knowing which to admire more: her gift as a writer or that she had the guts to carve out a place for herself in such an unforgiving world."" (Independent) ""Sensual, impressionistic prose that recreates vividly her experiences."" (The Times) ""An extraordinary woman... if you encountered her as a character in a novel, you'd want to read on."" (Express) ""She has the surrealist's gift for making the mundane exotic."" (Financial Times) ""Combines a powerful sense of place with an unusually compassionate understanding of human complexity."" (Daily Telegraph) ""The author has an enviable narrative gift, and there is something magical about her deployment of it."" (Guardian) ""A spellbinding storyteller."" (The Listener)"

"""Lisa St Aubin de Terán writes with extraordinary vividness and clarity... She faces reality with a courage and skill that left me not knowing which to admire more: her gift as a writer or that she had the guts to carve out a place for herself in such an unforgiving world."" (Independent) ""Sensual, impressionistic prose that recreates vividly her experiences."" (The Times) ""An extraordinary woman... if you encountered her as a character in a novel, you'd want to read on."" (Express) ""She has the surrealist's gift for making the mundane exotic."" (Financial Times) ""Combines a powerful sense of place with an unusually compassionate understanding of human complexity."" (Daily Telegraph) ""The author has an enviable narrative gift, and there is something magical about her deployment of it."" (Guardian) ""A spellbinding storyteller."" (The Listener)"

Author Information

Lisa St Aubin de Teran is the prize-winning author of 20 books, including novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is Anglo-Guyanese, and was born and brought up in London. Aged 16, she married an exiled Venezuelan freedom fighter and landowner. After two years travelling around Italy and France, she moved to the Venezuelan Andes, where she managed her husband's semi-feudal sugar plantation for seven years. Much of her writing draws on that time and place. And time warps, rural communities, isolation and grace under pressure are still the dominant themes in both her life and her work.On the strength of 'Keepers of the House' she was chosen as a Best of British Young Novelist in 1982.After leaving the Andean hacienda, she lived as a perpetual traveller for the next twenty years. Then, in 2004, she settled in north Mozambique, establishing the Teran Foundation to develop community tourism. She lived there until 2021, returning to London with a bag full of manuscripts, including her autobiography, 'Better Broken Than New', and two new novels, 'The Hobby' and 'Kafka's Lodge'.

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