Better Broken Than New

Following a successful writing career – which saw the Anglo-Guyanese London-born author publish 20 works of fiction, short stories and nonfiction, including the bestselling Keepers of the House, Hacienda and The Slow Train to Milan – Lisa St Aubin de Terán retreated to a remote village in northern Mozambique: there she found her own African roots, founded a charity (The Terán Foundation) and confronted new challenges.

Much has been written about Lisa’s 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 attention surrounding 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.

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.