Award winning Puerto Rican novelist and poet Mayra Santos-Febres skilfully intertwines fact with imagination, poetry with prose, in her dazzling new novel . Based on the life and times of Isabel "La Negra" Luberza Oppenheimer, one of Puerto Rico's most famous Madams from the 1930s to the 1960s, Santos-Febres transforms this remarkable woman into an almost mythical creature.

Isabel's rags to riches story is a familiar one. The illegitimate daughter of an itinerant black washerwoman, Isabel is placed in a foster home when she is forty days old. Blessed with an exotic beauty, a keen intelligence, a steely determination and an eye for money making opportunities, by the time she is in her late twenties Isabel is the owner of a highly successful business. However rather than a general store, or a fashion salon, in Isabel's case the business is a bordello—surely one of the few businesses women were able to operate in Puerto Rico without too much opposition from men! As with so many famous self-made women in reality and fiction, Isabel has faithful friends but fickle lovers, and the theme of abandonment that began with her own birth is a recurring motif throughout Isabel's life.

What makes Our Lady of the Night such a beguiling novel is the way in which Santos-Febres tells Isabel's story. By interspersing straight narrative passages with lush and, at times, erotic litanies to the Virgin Mary, Santos-Febres links La Negra to the mysterious and powerful Black Madonna, a mystical figure whose origins can be traced back to the creation stories of many different cultures. Isabel comes to embody both Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, and Eve, the temptress or femme fatale. She is the Black Madonna who offers succour and comfort to those who come to her but she is also the detached Virgin Mother who allows her only child to be taken from her.

While Isabel is undoubtedly the heroine of this tale, the role of hero is somewhat surprisingly allocated to Luis Arsenio Fornaris, the son of Isabel's benefactor (and ex-lover). Luis is one of Puerto Rico's new men, and he looks to the United States, rather than to Europe for direction, and fortune. While in pursuit of his destiny, he discovers that love and passion can be both intoxicating and poisonous—a lesson already learnt by his own mad mother, and by Isabel.

Our Lady of the Night is not always an easy read, but it is a rewarding one. La Negra, as seen through the eyes of Mayra Santos-Febres , is an unforgettable woman. While this novel may leave you with more questions than answers, it is an experience one would not want to miss. To be swept away by the sheer force and beauty of the language is an intoxicating experience that will leave you wanting to read more by this author.

Read more about Mayra Santos-Febres at the website of The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.