Keepers of the House is the debut novel

Debut novel

A debut novel is the first novel an author publishes. Debut novels are the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to publish in the future...

 of Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Lisa St Aubin de Terán is an award-winning English novelist, writer of autobiographical fictions, and memoirist.Lisa St Aubin de Terán was born in 1953 and brought up in Clapham in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School...

, published as The Long Way Home in the US. The novel is autobiographical and set in a Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

n valley beset by drought. First published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

 it won the Somerset Maugham Award

Somerset Maugham Award

The Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each May by the Society of Authors. It is awarded to whom they judge to be the best writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a book published in the past year. The prize was instituted in 1947 by William Somerset Maugham and thus...

.

Plot introduction

The story concerns Lydia an Englishwoman who has married Diego, the second to last survivor of the Beltrán family. They return to La Bebella, a dilapidated mansion on a neglected estate upon which years of drought and disease have taken their toll. Only Benito, her husband's retainer, remains and when her husband becomes depressed and a virtual recluse, Lydia has to take on the management of the estate with its sparse avocado

Avocado

The avocado is a tree native to Central Mexico, classified in the flowering plant family Lauraceae along with cinnamon, camphor and bay laurel...

 and sugar cane crops. Benito recounts to her the past history of the family and its gradual decline and it is this history and the characters concerned which forms the bulk of the narrative.