Latest release by Erica Rummel

What They Said About Luisa

An enchanting tale of the complex and fascinating life of Luisa Abrego of Seville, an emancipated woman who forges a new future for herself in colonial Mexico and gets caught in the Spanish Inquisition.

Luisa Abrego, a slave in Seville, is set free on her master's death and marries a white man. After boarding Luisa's illegitimate child with the nuns of Saint Clare, the couple sets out for Mexico. There Luisa is accused of bigamy and tried in the court of the Inquisition.

This is, however, not Luisa's own story: the narrators are witnesses to her life, people who encountered her, from nuns to silver miners to Inquisitors. These are European voices, the recorded voices of history, in whose accounts a fractured portrait of a fascinating and complex woman emerges, like glimpses of a figure moving past a mirror.

Based on 16th century trial records of the real Luisa, this novel is not just one woman's life in fragments, but a carefully researched imagining, told in vivid, distinct voices, of how the Inquisition affected the Spanish colonies.