The Hacienda

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran was a romantic seventeen-year-old when she married a South American aristocrat twenty years her senior. Seduced by tales of his ancestral home, she left England for his family's vast plantation deep in the Venezuelan Andes. Soon after her arrival, the fantasy disintegrated and Lisa found herself trapped in an exotic and unfamiliar world, married to a man who grew increasingly unstable, and counting as her closest companions a pet vulture, two pedigreed beagles, and la gente, the illiterate peasants who lived and worked on the estate. Through the tumultuous years that followed, Lisa discovered an untapped reservoir of personal strength and, in the end, used it to save her life. 342 pages.