Lisa St Aubin de Terán
A new edition of the best-selling third book
“Lucien lived in a landscape of fear, on the dry lands known as Los Llanos… There the sun never set, but sank and was buried in the hot dust and lay in a scratched grave with the remains of dead cows.”
The servants said that even the waters of the Orinoco obeyed Misia Schmutter, the white-haired old lady, so proud of her Prussian ancestry, who treated the world like her slave. She had seen a glint of her own ruthlessness in her grandson Lucien’s eye. Worshipping and torturing him by turns she cultivated in him a terrible understanding of tyranny and the true nature of power. She passed on to him a love of beauty and science and of roulette.
Even after her death ‘the Empress of the Orinoco’ would hold Lucien in a relentless stranglehold, clinging like a tiger to his back, a demon people could glimpse through Lucien’s gentleness. Misia Schmutter would be there as he set out from the plains of San Fernando de Apure for the extraordinary journeys of his life, first to Caracas where he lived in sumptuous excess in a gothic palace, crowded with the human vultures who took advantage of his almost demented generosity. Later, when he was declared a public menace and locked away, tales of his extravagance would continue to flourish, as would the legend of his extraordinary luck at gambling.
Like a pilgrim to a shrine, Lucien made his way to the German fatherland which Misia Schmutter had so passionately described to him, to find the Nazis on the verge of havoc. He returned to his beloved Venezuela, to be imprisoned for treason and escape through the forest. Arrested and convicted for a murder he had not committed.
Lisa St Aubin de Terán, winner of the 1983 Somerset Maugham Award (Keepers of the House) and the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize (The Slow Train to Milan), has surpassed even those outstanding literary achievements in The Tiger. Her narrative has a seductive lyricism with a sharp shining edge to it and a sweep which is breathtaking. In this novel spanning nearly seventy years, she has portrayed a legend of haunting intensity.
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
Lisa St Aubin de Terán is the prize-winning author of 20 books, including novels, short stories and nonfiction. 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 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 (soon to be published by Amaurea): The Hobby and Kafka Lodge.
This new edition accompanies the publication of Lisa’s new memoir, Better Broken Than New
ISBN 978-1-914278-21-1 (hardback) (£24.95/€28.95/$29.95)
ISBN 978-1-914278-22-8 (paperback) (£12.95/€14.95/€15.95)
ISBN 978-1-914278-23-5 (ebook) (£2.99/€3.49/€3.99)
“Always interesting, beautifully written, with the delicacy and intelligence of a great cat; perhaps a literary tiger.”
The Times
“This is a remarkable novel… Inevitably it will be compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Apart from its South American setting, it has the same flamboyant style, and it similarly inflates its characters into creatures of myth.”
Sunday Telegraph
“There is no doubt of the depth and range of this author’s talent.”
Spectator
Also by Lisa St Aubin de Terán, and published by Amaurea Press:
