Boundaries between fact and fiction are rarely clear cut, but in South America they are less blurred than dissolved. However even the combined imaginations of Borges, Allende and Marquez would be hard put to invent the life histories of Iseult Teran and her mother, Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
The surname comes from Iseult's father Jaime, whose family have been in Venezuela "since the Conquistadores", she tells me when we meet over a plate of sausages and mash in a faux-working class pub in London's far from working class Notting Hill. Even here where beautiful women are hardly rarities, Iseult Teran turns heads, golden-maned and golden-skinned, carrying her beauty as easily as she carries her rucksack. Yet she seems genuinely unaware of the effect on those around her.
Her father, an archetypal aristo-leftie, met Lisa on one of his bank-robbing trips to Europe - raising money for Venezuelan freedom fighters. It was the adventure she had been waiting for. And the striking English girl was a useful moll, 16 and beautiful. The pair evidently did well, divesting banks of their cash through France and Italy - a tale retold in Lisa St Aubin de Teran's Slow Train To Milan.
Lisa's own background was equally bizarre. She was the eldest of four daughters born to Iseult's grandmother who had four husbands (one child each), had been abandoned by all of them and made ends meet running a remand home in Blackfriars while living in a council flat in south London. Lisa's father was black, from Guyana. And it was her appearance - dark-skinned, but light-haired - Iseult explains, that was responsible for the Teran's refusal to accept Lisa into the family once the couple arrived back in Venezuela on the run from Interpol.
"One generation down, my brother and my sister and I could pass for European. But not my mother. She didn't fit in South America, or anywhere. Not white, not black. My father's family are very pure, very light skinned, with dark curly hair. So the Terans just thought my mother was some sort of fruit bowl. They just didn't know how to accept her. And the only times they'd seen somebody dressing like that was a peasant, or the workers on the farms." As for the peasants themselves, "they thought she was the ghost of my father's grandmother".
It was Lisa's habit of wearing Edwardian dresses that made Iseult realise her mother was somehow different. "At that time all the other mothers who would come to the playground to pick up their kids were wearing hippy sheepskin coats. But my mother wore these long cloaks with silver clasps. When we got out to Italy she really came into her own, she'd wear long dresses, like ball gowns. Incredibly fashionable now. It was very much her own style. But because she also looked quite strange with her dark skin and light hair, that always used to attract attention." It had started when Lisa was 12, and living in a Clapham council flat through a friend of her mother "who did theatre costumes".
For all the Terans' aristrocratic ethnic purity, when Jaime and his runaway bride arrived home, the estate was falling apart after decades of neglect. Their son's despised new wife took over and within five years had turned it around. Shortly after their arrival, when Lisa was still only 19, Iseult was born. Over the next few years Jaime became increasingly unstable and, when he threatened to kill all of them in a suicide pact, Lisa packed bags, baby and left. Iseult was five. She has never seen her father since. Shortly after their escape, he was diagnosed schizophrenic. Father and daughter have a telephone relationship, but - according to Iseult - he's still a wanted man in Europe.
For several years Lisa and Iseult were "on the run". Not from the police, Iseult explains, but from the Teran family who couldn't care less about the mother but wanted the daughter who was, after all, "a Teran".
Piecing together what exactly happened next is somewhat difficult. On the page, jumps in narrative are marked with changes in typeface. However, one-to-one, Iseult assumes her mother's picaresque life story is common knowledge. And where Lisa went, so too did Iseult. Until Lisa married the poet, George Macbeth, and lived in Norfolk. At first her grandmother came to look after her, then at 11 she went to boarding school in Gloucestershire. Then, when the Macbeth marriage broke up, there was the flat in the crumbling palazzo in Venice where her brother was born - "it was nice but a bit like a museum. And smelly in summer from the canals."
Then there was Umbria. "I went there when I was 14 and I had to go back to school with 8-year-olds to get my Italian to a standard so that I could be in school. It was the only way my mother would let me leave boarding school. It was humiliating - my legs didn't even fit under the table. But it was very clever. I got the confidence to speak the language without ever having to think about it."
Her first novel, Dolce Vita, is clearly autobiographical and spans a year in the life of Mina, a girl with only a vague hold on reality who is involved (or is she?) with two equally unsuitable men, the 21-year-old playboy and the older man.
When not making lists, or working as a telephone sex operator (or does she?) or waiting for her older lover to come back to the hotel room, Mina, 16, is haunted by memories of her eccentric mother and their nomadic existence when she was a child.
"She collected antique clothes," she writes, "which she used to lug around in trunks. Everywhere we settled, she'd tip these trunks out (to her lover's despair) and they'd heap up with velvets and silks, cuffs of embroidery, kimonos, Chinese coats from Xian, braid and beads and 1920s sequins. In hotels, the chambermaid would sometimes report a burglary and my mother would then have to explain that it was just her way to jumble her clothes as though the room had been rifled by vandals."
Iseult Teran sees Dolce Vita as a kind of Bonjour Tristesse for the 1990s: rich-kid Mina roughing it in red-light Paris, where she hobnobs with transvestite prostitutes, gets stoned, gets laid.
"I wanted it to be itchingly embarrassing. We've all been 16 and it's easy to forget. It's like putting your dirty laundry out in a way. It's the difference between trying to impress your friends by hiding your Wham records and suddenly putting Puccini on - or saying, I listen to Wham and Ha Ha, how naff and funny. And feeling this nostalgia and tenderness about it. What I wanted to get across was at the age of 16 you think you are the most important thing in the world. You believe you will never die, you will never be in a car accident."
Indeed, Iseult has not been in a car accident, although 10 years ago the inhabitants of the village in Umbria where her mother now lives with husband number three were under the impression that she had. There had to be some explanation, Iseult explains, for the way she looked, her face so bruised that passport officials hadn't recognised her.
The reality was that she had been beaten up and left for dead in a ditch outside a seaside resort in Brazil by three policemen. The only reason she wasn't technically raped was because the leader proved impotent.
The event is described in graphic detail in Dolce Vita. She decided to include it because, she said, she wanted people to know. "Because these girls that I've met, who similar things have happened to - they feel that it's still their fault. And you just want to shake them because they're so deeply scared, they can't go out of the house, can't have a boyfriend, won't wear make-up, won't wear nice clothes. And, however much time we spent talking to this girl, who was in her twenties, you knew she had been in no way provocative."
She hasn't been back to Brazil since the trial when the men were convicted and jailed. "I think the best, strongest thing to do, to combat what happened to you, is have a life afterwards," she says now. Although how strong it was to marry a man 25 years her senior, is open to debate. Michael Radford, director of White Mischief and Il Postino, was a family friend who had known Iseult since her mother's move to Italy.
It was a terrible mistake. For all the mother-and-daughter globe-trotting, she says she was a very naive 16-year old. "I'd been protected all my life. I was a child who was protected in playgrounds. My head was totally up in the clouds. I had just gone through that attack and I was very confused and vulnerable. He told me that he needed me, and that if I didn't he would throw himself out of a window. So much emotional pressure. And I did this stupid thing and I said yes, and I got pregnant immedately." The result was Felix, now aged eight.
Within a year she had left Radford and returned to Umbria. Three years ago she met Nick Ysenberg, a documentary photographer. They married earlier this year. Until then there were no boyfriends, no life outside Felix, she says. "If it wasn't for my family I couldn't have done it because I didn't even know how to look after myself' let alone a kid."
Now, post-novel, life is opening up. Journalism beckons: she spent the summer in Cuba - a joint project with her husband - exposing the sex trade in young children. She's half way through an Open University history degree. They're looking for "a little yummy cottage" by the sea in Applecross, in the north of Scotland. They were there in October and fell in love with it.
Moving on is something Iseult Teran seems born to. "I knew I had to do something," she says, "when Felix looked out of the window of the London flat and said, `There's no view Mummy' and I just thought, What am I doing?"
Dolce Vita by Iseult Teran is published by Flamingo at £12.99