and practices to a society suffering through the repressive throes of the Spanish Inquisition. In Barbara Mujica’s masterful tale, her story?her days of youthful romance, her sensual fits of spiritual rapture, secret heritage as a Jewish convert to Catholicism, cloak-and-dagger political dealings, struggles against sexual blackmail, and mysterious illness?unfolds with a tumultuous urgency. Blending fact with fiction in vivid detail, painstakingly researched and beautifully rendered, Mujica’s tale conjures a brilliant picture of sisterhood, faith, the terror of religious persecution, the miracle of salvation, and to one woman’s challenge to the power of strict orthodoxy, a challenge that consisted of a crime of passion?her own personal relationship with God.

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