Don Roberto's Daughter

Edwardian Peru was the setting of Dolly Pflucker's extraordinary childhood. Her father, Don Roberto, was the grandson of a Pole from Silesia; his mother was Peruvian, but he went to school at Harrow and he married an English girl. When Dolly was born in Lima in 1900, the family's fortune, built on the rich seams of copper and silver in the region of Lake Morococha, was colossal. It was a wealth which enabled the Pfluckers to maintain several establishments in Europe, and to import the luxuries of London and Paris into their life in Lima. Mrs. Langdon has known Dolly (Mrs. Jack Brogan) for twenty-seven years. In this book she assumes her identity and recaptures with great subtlety the flavour of Dolly's upbringing, with its often hilarious blending of English and South American values. She also conveys most touchingly its sadness, for during the first sixteen years of Dolly's life - as an only child - the financial assumptions on which the Pflucker way of life was based began to be called into question and her parents grew apart.

Don Roberto's Daughter not only evokes an age, a place and a childhood that is unimaginable today, but it is also a wonderful portrait of Don Roberto, a man of no ambition and one who not having the drive and skill of his fathers, found nothing to replace it - except enormous charm.