Beautiful Irishwoman Eliza Lynch became briefly, in the 1860s, the richest woman in the world. This wonderfully written novel opens in Paris with Eliza in bed with Francisco Solano Lopez - heir to the untold wealth of Paraguay. The fruit of their congress will be extraordinary, and will send Eliza across the Atlantic on a regal voyage to claim her glorious future in Asuncion.

With the lavish imaginative richness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the crazed panoramic sweep of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, this novel is a bold and brilliantly achieved story about sex, beauty and corruption and the end of the old world by one of Ireland's finest contemporary novelists.