In the prologue to his compulsively readable new novel Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes how, in 1949, as a young reporter in Cartagena, he witnessed the opening of several tombs as an old convent made way for a new hotel. One of the tombs contained the skeleton of a young girl with a head of prodigiously long red hair.

Of Love And Other Demons is the story of that girl, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, who at the age of twelve is bitten by a rabid dog and handed over by her father to a convent. There she is thought to be possessed by devils and locked up. The bishop orders the priest, Cayetano Delaura, to exorcise her.