Of Love and Other Demons

Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez blends the natural with supernatural in Of Love and Other Demons - a novel which explores community, superstition and collective hysteria. ''An ash-grey dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst on to the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December'' When a witch doctor appears on the Marquis de Casalduero''s doorstep prophesising a plague of rabies in the Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims - until he hears that his young daughter, Sierva María, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. Sierva María appears completely unscathed - but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition, it''s not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession