Lisa St Aubin de Teran – författare

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 1982‘Exceptional’ ObserverLydia Sinclair was just seventeen when she arrived on her husband’s estate in the Andes, and from the first day she felt that she belonged there.Keepers of the House tells the story of a young English woman newly married to a sugar planter. As her husband, the last of the Beltran family line, retreats into himself, Lydia finds solace in the stories of Benito, the family’s oldest retainer. Unearthing the Beltran family’s tragic history, she weaves together a rich gothic tapestry in which the fantastic legends of the past are intertwined with the present.

MOZAMBIQUE MYSTERIES is about turning fifty and finding a new direction. Lisa St Aubin de Terán travelled to Mozambique and, for the first time in her much-travelled life, felt at home - in a place 'so remote that few have visited it since the time of Vasco da Gama'. After three marriages and various affairs, she also fell in love. She set up a school and, together with her niece, the Terán Foundation. From the acclaimed author of THE HACIENDA, Mozambique Mysteries is a story of new beginnings in a country of contrasts and challenges - her most inspiring story yet.

Married at sixteen to a man twenty years her senior who spoke no English, she was taken to his ancestral home and estate where she found herself living in the most primitive of conditions, isolated and alone. St. Aubin de Teran ended up virtually running the plantation that belonged to her increasingly demented husband but enjoyed learning the mores and magic of a place that had remained practically unchanged for more than a century. Written in mesmerising prose, this is the extraordinary story of a young woman surviving by her wits and fantasies.

The turnstile into Italy has clicked continually for centuries - Lord Byron loved here and continues to draw romantics in his wake, Stendhal concluded: 'The charm of Italy is akin to that of being in love'. Yet Italians love their country more than any foreigner ever can, it is a place where labourers do hum Verdi, quote Dante and find their lunch delicious. Italians love of art, architecture and life itself is what drew Lisa St Aubin to this beautiful country. She extracts the work of, among others, Dante, Edith Wharton, Leonardo da Vinci, Rosetta Loy, Mary McCarthy, Goethe, Primo Levi, Turner, Shelley, Claire Sterling, Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Morante, Molly Lefebure and Keats. 'Italy is mostly an emotion' - Henry James'All the dreams of my youth I now behold realised before me' - Goethe'They make love a great deal - and assassinate a little' - Byron

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.

A new edition of the best-selling, award-winning first book.When the Beltrán brothers came to this Andean valley, they found behind barred windows beautiful twin sisters – last in the line of an illustrious conquistador. Through them the Beltrán dynasty was born – a dynasty that ruled the valley for 200 years and was now returning to the dust.Two centuries later, Lydia Sinclair was scarcely out of school when she fell in love with Don Diego Beltrán and left England behind for her husband’s Andean estate. Benito, the family’s oldest retainer, said that through her the valley would not be forgotten: 'Fate has brought you here to us, to chronicle our decline.'In the night's stillness he told her of romance and battle, drought and pestilence, splendour and suffering.The characters in the valley's tumultuous history rose up before Lydia as if they still roamed the dusty slopes: Admiral Silence who enjoyed no one's company so decided never to speak again; General Mario who prophesied the ruin of their valley as he decayed from leprosy behind a mask; María Candelaria whose beauty and wildness caused the massacre of nearly half of the Beltráns; La Comadre Matilide, the peasant woman of striking ugliness whom people bribed to stay in their houses because her departure left a sense of ill omen; the aged sisters who sat amidst hoards of china and gambled at cards for their every move. Finally there was Cristóbal Beltrán, who sifted the sand in the hourglass, ageless and all-knowing and indestructable.Out of the upheaval and decay come a narrative and language astonishing in their fertility. This new edition accompanies the publication of Lisa’s new memoir, Better Broken Than New.

A new edition of the best-selling, award-winning second book.To Lizaveta, César remained as much of an enigma after two years of their nomadic exile together as he had that first day in Clapham when he took up his peculiar vigil in her mother’s kitchen and showed no signs of shifting out of her life, ever. ‘South America,’ this total stranger had pronounced unaccountably and then had fallen silent until hours later when Lisaveta decided to introduce herself. in response to her name he replied, 'No'.'What do you mean "No"?' she demanded, but was to remain in the dark on this, as on other vital questions: such as why César’s friends Otto and Elías were on the run and from whom, why she was expected to carry guns on a holiday to Paris, and why there was so thick an atmosphere of mystery about everything when she couldn’t pinpoint the danger. Through her 16-year-old eyes she saw 35-year-old César as old and slightly debauched but strikingly beautiful. His air of dissipated grandeur seemed to disarm almost everyone and she marvelled how even in London he was treated like some kind of protected species or listed building. ‘My friends are waiting for a bullet,’ Cesar told her, 'they don’t shoot people like me'.From London the now indivisible foursome drift southwards from Paris to Milan and back – stopping in Bologna, Grenoble, and Venice – wherever the slow train takes them. They live like divine fugitives, resplendent in silks and Mercedes one month, warding off starvation the next. The danger for Otto and Elías is constant and palpable. For all of them, tension circumscribes an almost flamboyant kind of lassitude.This new edition accompanies the publication of Lisa’s new memoir, Better Broken Than New.

A new edition of the best-selling fourth novel.It all appears innocent enough: a handsome couple in their thirties – she an actress, he a successful graphic designer – revisiting Sestri Levante on the Italian Riviera where they once spent their honeymoon. But it is not at all innocent. The couple have been driven here by paranoia – by a slow dread of what will happen to the two of them and to their daughters if anyone finds out about their baby Amadeo, whose identity, and even whose existence, is at the heart of the schizophrenic illness from which Rosalind has long suffered. Two people hiding the world from each other, Rosalind and William cannot escape the chilling truth that lies at the centre of Lisa St Aubin de Terán's compelling novel.The resort of Sestri Levante has twin, Janus-facing bays: one which Hans Christian Andersen called the Bay of Fairytales and another which the local people have long called the Bay of Silence. It is to the Bay of Silence that Rosalind now retraces her steps – to the spot where she first encountered the exotic golden stranger Angelo who was to play such a seductive and haunting role on her honeymoon and in her marriage. Both she and her husband independently try to make sense of the tragic events which have engulfed their lives. They each try to analyse the pressure placed on their marriage – which has allowed distressing events to be forgotten and self-delusion to herald the unthinkable.In her fourth novel, Lisa St Aubin de Terán creates an atmosphere which is profoundly unsettling. She weaves an escalating story of tension and human drama, combining the depth of character analysis which was so admired in The Tiger, with a striking new sense of pace and menace.Lisa St Aubin de Terán is the prize-winning Anglo-Guyanese London-born author of 20 books, including novels, short stories and nonfiction. Much of her writing draws on her varied life experiences. And time warps, rural communities, isolation and grace under pressure are still the dominant themes in both her life and work.

When police pay a visit to an elderly peeping tom, they unexpectedly stumble upon a loose thread that leads detective John Custer into a murky world of sex crimes and serial killings, of hidden graves and socially impeccable paedophiles. Ignoring the scepticism of his colleagues and superiors, Custer doggedly follows his intuition that there really is something very wrong that needs to be discovered, however cold the trail seems to have become.Inspired by some of the many paedophile conspiracies that have been uncovered in recent years, and the cases of abused children, The Hobby is a psychological crime thriller, ranging from the fan club of a 1940s child star, through Istanbul and war-torn Burma and Cairo, to 1980s Britain. Custer and his assistant, Sergeant Jolly Campbell, seek to bring justice to the forgotten victims, while themselves going through their own quest for personal redemption.