Eva Luna, entwined with her lover in bed, is asked to tell him a story "you have never told anyone before". As she relates a tale of twenty-three interwoven parts, she knits a kaleidoscopic portrait of the people and landscape of South America. Here are guerillas and fortune-tellers, tyrants and great beauties, whores and peasants. These are stories of poverty and politics, passion and pain, tragedy and comedy, all gloriously imagined by one of the world"s most captivating storytellers.