Southpaw: Short Stories - Tapa blanda

The collection contains some of St Aubin de Terán's most satisfying work to date ... An absorbing storyteller, St Aubin finds other people's life stories even more enchanted than her own (INDEPENDENT)

Her vivid, telling sketches of characters in a remote Umbrian village linger in the memory (SUNDAY TIMES)

A jubilant sense of place pervades the stories, together with the smell of woodsmoke, acacia blossom and the day's baking (SUNDAY TRIBUNE)

Lisa St Aubin de Teran never seems to run out of material from her extraordinarily exotic life... as with all de Teran's books the language she uses is beautiful and evocative. (DAILY MAIL)

Venezuela to Italy, villages to prisons, forests to whore houses are the backdrops to these short stories which reflect the people and the places that have informed this wonderful writer's work. Antonio Mezzano in Umbria, the blind man who gathers village gossip in his one good hand; La Rusa who runs her Rainbow brothel in the Andes; Eladio 'the mad man' who searches with his mute son for the eagle they stubbornly believe will restore them to health; Otto, the political prisoner called Proff who shares his cell with a killer; tiny Silvio the poet on Buona Vita Street; Nanzia, the family cook whose heart was chopped like parsley on marble when love came her way. In many senses, these are the dispossessed but through these compassionate and vivid tales, we see them anew - prostitutes, peasants, shopkeepers, mothers among them - with a will to survive that has given them grace and humour. Once again, Lisa St Aubin de Terán's writing casts a spell and a mood that leave the reader in no doubt of her intimate knowledge and love for the countries she has called home.