A short, strange, feverish late García Márquez novel about love, superstition, power, disease, religion, and the way a society people into symbols when they become too difficult to remain 'people'. 

In eighteenth-century colonial Colombia, twelve-year-old Sierva María is bitten by a rabid dog and sent into the machinery of church authority, medical panic, family neglect, and spiritual paranoia. What might be illness becomes possession; what might be care becomes confinement; what might be love becomes another kind of danger. García Márquez is doing his usual high-wire act here, but darker and more compressed: plague, convents, forbidden desire, aristocratic decay, holy theatre, and a girl with hair like a myth being slowly interpreted to death.

A beautiful, unsettling pick for readers of magical realism at its more gothic and morally uneasy edge. Less sprawling than One Hundred Years of Solitude, more like a reliquary with a pulse.

1995 Jonathan Cape paperback, first UK edition / first printing, with full number line. Translated by Edith Grossman. Good clean reading copy with light shelf wear.