Dimensions
130 x 197 x 18mm
Dona Ines is the narrator of this wonderful novel that follows the history of Venezuela from the 18th century to the present day. Claiming to be a descendant of the earliest conquistadors, she is a wealthy landowner and member of the ruling class in Caracas - a small village in the 1780s. Dona Ines is obsessed with a legal wrangle over a parcel of land, now a cocoa plantation, for which the deeds have disappeared. Is the land hers, or does it belong to Juan del Rosario, the illegitimate son her husband had by one of their slave women? A village named Curiepe has been built on the land but Dona Ines has had the local governor evict its slave population and burn it down. So is set a pattern that moves through two centuries, beyond the death of Dona Ines, who continues to narrate the story from beyond the grave.
Winner of the Mobil's Pegasus Prize for Literature
