Of Love and Other Demons

A brilliantly moving tour de force--A. S. Byatt, The New York Times Book Review Amid the lush, coastal tropics of an eighteenth-century South American seaport, an unruly, copper-haired girl and a bookish priest are caught in a chaste, ill-fated love affair. Sierva Maria, the only child of a decaying noble family, has been raised in the slave quarters of her father's mansion while her mother resides on a faraway plantation. On her twelfth birthday she is bitten by a rabid dog, and even as the wound heals she is made to endure therapies indistinguishable from torture. Believed to be possessed, she is incarcerated in a convent, where she meets Father Cayetano Delaura, who has been sent to oversee her exorcism. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels "something immense and irreparable." It is love, "the most terrible demon of all." "A work of considerable beguilement and edge...García Márquez retains a vital and remarkable voice, and the pen of an angel."--Los Angeles Times Book Review "Captivating...Of Love and Other Demons evokes the texture of a civilization, while its emotional range, from the comic to the mystical, exhibits a reach rarely found in fictions on a larger scale."--The Boston Globe "Luminous...demonstrates that one of the masters of the form is still working at the height of his powers."--The New York Times