Sister Teresa

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 Bárbara 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 of 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.