She is Saint Teresa--known as a mystic, reformer and founder of convents, and the author of numerous texts that introduced her radical religious ideas 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.
Author Biography
B rbara Mujica is a novelist, short story writer, critic, professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, and a contributor to many publications, such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of the novels The Deaths of Don Bernardo, Frida, and Sister Teresa, and lives in Washington, D.C.
