Mozambique Mysteries Lisa St Aubin de Teran Virago, 370pp, £17.99

Don’t let the title of this book fool you: it is not about Mozambique. What we do learn about this small corner of the world is interesting but incidental: this book is about Lisa St Aubin de Teran. She’s not an uninteresting subject – as a 16-year-old she eloped from Clapham with a Venezuelan landowner twice her age, and she is now the veteran of three disastrous marriages, several novels and memoirs. She is, as she puts it, “a writer and a free spirit, who can rarely say ‘no’ to someone in need”. Hence, when she first visited Mozambique, specifically the small island Carcibera Pequena, she established a college for tourism and agriculture there, enabling its inhabitants to “lead their way out of economic slavery”.

By happy coincidence she also found love in this adventure, too – as we discover in the chapter entitled “How I Found Mees, Or How He Found Me”. What would you know, she only found the right man when she gave up looking.

Teran’s writing has won many accolades, and one can see why: it is vivid, intense and nicely cadenced. But it is also full of nauseating clichés and her level of self-regard is staggering. Even in the chapter on slavery, she wanders off on a tangent. The real story – about Mozambique and the Teran Foundation – is an absorbing one. Unfortunately the narrator keeps getting in the way.

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