Of Love and Other Demons

Amid the lush, coastal tropics of an eighteenth-century South American seaport, an unruly, copper-haired girl and a bookish priest are caught in 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."