Valeria Sarmiento

A picaresque chronicle of Laura, a peasant maid, and Sebastian, the young orphan in her charge, against a backdrop of overflowing passion and revolutionary intrigue in Europe at the twilight of the 18th century.

Based on the case of Hermine van Hug, a 1920s psychoanalyst who believed that criminal tendencies are formed at age five and who labeled her nephew a murderer before he reached adolescence. The nephew proved her right by strangling her.

"On the verge of a forced retirement, Don Celso, an elderly office worker begins to relive both real and imagined memories from his life--a trip to the movies as a young boy with Beethoven, listening to tall tales from Long John Silver, a brief stay in a haunted hotel. Stories hide within stories and the thin line between imagination and reality steadily erodes, opening up a marvelous new world of personal remembrance and fantastic melodrama"--Container....

This lavish, star-studded epic set during the great Napoleonic Wars chronicles the lives of both the nobility and the poor against a tapestry of love affairs, deceit, intrigue and violence.