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 Elias 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, ' César 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 Elias is constant and palpable. For all of them, tension circumscribes an almost flamboyant kind of lassitude.
Lisa St Aubin de Terán's first novel, Keepers of the House, introduced a writer of rare virtuosity. She has more than fulfilled the promise of that remarkable début in this unusual and captivating odyssey.
Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize
St Aubin de Terán, Lisa: - 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, 'The Hobby' and 'Kafka Lodge'
