Toby Green’s A Fistful of Shells (2019) was a scintillating history of West Africa from the inception of the Atlantic slave trade to the 19th century. Green has now returned to West Africa but written something more intimate. In The Heretic of Cacheu, he uses records from the Inquisition’s trial of Crispina Peres to reconstruct part of the history of Portuguese Guinea in the mid-17th century.

As such, this is a micro-history – rich in texture, heavy in detail – in the vein of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. As Green sets out the various elements of life in Cacheu, a port at the mouth of the river of the same name, a sense develops of how the townspeople lived, loved, fought and died.

The men and women of Cacheu traded in kola nuts, bolts of cloth, loaves of wax and oliphant hunting horns. Some lived in houses of dried earth and palm leaves, others in structures of wood, stone and lime. They owned Chinese porcelain and plates made of Bolivian silver. They ate