Doña Inés 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. Doña Inés is obsessed with a legal wrangle over a parcel of land, now a cocoa plantation, for which the deeds has 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 name Curiepe has been built on the land but Doña Inés 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 Doña Inés, who continues to narrate the story from beyond the grave. We follow the descendants of her own line and the slaves, in a continuous bloody battle for the land, mirroring the country's many civil wars. Modernization and railways arrive and people's lives change dramatically but the battle between the classes, for the land, is only resolved in the twentieth century, when tourism offers some kind of solution. Here is a broad, vivid canvas, peopled with a nation's history and conflict, dotted with Venezuelan words and rituals, a beautifully-phrased eye-opener of a novel.