Based on one of the greatest true stories of seduction and abandonment, Mariana is the saga of the nun who wrote the Love Letters acclaimed as some of the most passionate documents in existence. They were bestsellers in her own time and have continued to touch hearts everywhere, with over 250 editions sold out in languages all over the world. She has inspired artists such as Matisse, Modigliani, and Braque, and such writers as Stendahl, who said of her, "It is necessary to love like the Portuguese nun, with that ardent soul whose fiery mark is left for us in her letters."

In seventeenth-century Portugal, Sister Mariana Alcoforado shocked the world by having a fervent affair with a French officer, Captain Noel Bouton, part of the army that had come to aid Portugal’s struggle for independence from Spain.

For the first time in English, the entire story of her life in the convent is told in detail.

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Mariana, selected by the U.S. Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998, has been published in two editions in English (HarperCollins/Flamingo in England and Aliform Press in Minneapolis), Spanish, German (including a paperback edition), Greek, Italian (where it was one of Rizzoli's top three books of the year), and Portuguese, which was a bestseller in several editions, including a mass-market pocket book.  The Portuguese edition is available in the U.S. via the Luso-Americano bookstore in Newark, New Jersey.

Praise for Mariana:

"Mariana's letters, translated here by Vaz, are simple, strong arguments for the purity of love, and they seem to penetrate the human heart with startling directness . . . Mariana's evocation of life in seventeenth-century Portugal glows with colour . . . and is most successful in its lyrical descriptions of ordinary lives transfigured, in its detailing of everyday routines and beliefs, and in its account of spiritual and emotional struggles."—Times Literary Supplement

"Vaz has succeeded in the daunting task of blending an exquisitely beautiful love story with an insightful exploration of the sort of mysticism that springs from the combination of carnal experience and the forced absence of it within the walls of a cloister. To these elements is added a poetic and heartrending portrait of a woman. Seldom does one read pages of such intense beauty and intelligence about the female heart like those written by Vaz."—Simonetta Bartolini, Il Giornale

"As well as being a saga and a love story, Mariana is also . . . a crossweave of Portuguese folklore, country tradition and religious ritual . . . (and) presents a texture of Alentejan rural life in the seventeenth century, of interest to any modern reader for whom the pleasures of visiting Portugal involve a degree of travel and a deepening of awareness about the diversity of the land and its people . . .Vaz's commitment to construct her novel from the roots upwards pays off well in the metaphorical and mythic frame of reference this enables her to develop. . . . the novel amply testifies to the delight of Mariana’s story, the wealth of documentation on her life and times, and the pleasure still to be derived from reading about the scandal of forbidden love."
— Hilary Owen, Cultura

Visit my additional praise page for more reviews.