Lisa St. Aubin de Terán was a romantic seventeen-year-old when she married Don Jaime, a South American aristocrat twenty years her senior. Quickly seduced by tales of his ancestral home, she left England for his family's vast sugarcane and avocado plantation, deep in the Venezuelan Andes. There the fantasy life she had imagined met with an almost unbelievable reality—the plantation was in shambles, and her dashing husband turned out to be an international fugitive, suffering from hereditary madness.

In her first days on The Hacienda, Lisa found herself virtually abandoned in the wilderness, with only a pet vulture, two pedigreed beagles, and la gente—the estate's illiterate, feudal people—for company. But during the tumultuous years that followed, Lisa evolved from bewildered child bride to powerful matriarch. The Hacienda tells the sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing story of how Lisa courageously restored the plantation, miraculously gave birth to her first child, and, perhaps hardest of all, won the respect of la gente. She discovered an untapped reservoir of personal strength and, in the end, was forced to use it to save her own life.

The Hacienda describes an adventure so eccentric it often assumes the dreamlike quality of magical realism. But this is a deftly handled true story--of a woman learning to adapt and thrive, and of a writer finding her imaginative roots. Tremendously atmospheric, Lisa St. Aubin de Terán's memoir brilliantly evokes the unique confluence of time, place, and people that shaped this powerful writer.