A sweeping historical romance inspired by the real-life daughter of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrated author of Don Quixote Madrid, 1599. Following her mother’s sudden death, fifteen-year-old Isabel goes to live in the family home of her father, the poet and war hero Miguel de Cervantes, a man she has never met. Forced to pose as a maid to conceal her illegitimate status, Isabel must adapt to a new way of life with her jealous cousin and protective aunts while she waits for her father to return from Seville. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Esquivias, Miguel’s pious and faithful wife Catalina similarly awaits his return, blissfully unaware of Isabel’s existence. As Miguel works on the manuscript that will become his masterpiece, Don Quixote, the years pass and Isabel grows into womanhood, falling in and out love, uncovering family secrets, and yearning for the legitimacy denied her by a rigid and callous society. Capturing two tumultuous decades of Golden Age Spain in rich historical detail, Martha Bátiz paints a compassionate portrait of a family on the precipice of great change and the fiercely independent woman at its centre striving to make a life of her own.
Author
Martha Batiz was born and raised in Mexico City, but has been living in Toronto since 2003. She started publishing in 1993 at age 22. Her articles, chronicles, reviews and short stories have appeared in diverse newspapers and magazines not only in her homeland, but also in Spain, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Peru, Ireland, England, the United States, Australia, and Canada. Her first book was a short-story collection called A todos los voy a matar (I’m Going To Kill Them All, Castillo Press, 2000). Her award-winning novella The Wolf’s Mouth/ Damiana's Reprieve (Exile Editions, 2009 and 2018, respectively) was originally published in Spanish both in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico (Boca de lobo, in 2007 and 2008, respectively), and is available on Audible in Spanish since 2021. The Wolf's Mouth/Damiana's Reprieve is available in French as La Gueule du Loup since 2018. A second short-story collection titled De tránsito (In Transit) was published in 2014 in Puerto Rico by Terranova Editores, and received an honorary mention in the International Latino Book Awards in San Francisco in 2015. Martha went on to win the First Place in the International Latino Book Awards in 2018 for her first short-story collection in English, Plaza Requiem: Stories at the Edge of Ordinary Lives (Exile Editions, 2017). Her most recent book is another short-story collection titled No Stars in the Sky (House of Anansi Press, 2022). Martha holds a PhD in Latin American Literature and is an ATA-certified literary translator. Besides being the founder and instructor of the Creative Writing in Spanish course currently offered by the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, she is a part-time Professor at York University/Glendon College, where she teaches Spanish literature and language, and Literary Translation. In 2014, Martha was featured in Latinos Magazine among the Top Ten Most Successful Mexicans in Canada. In 2015, she was chosen as one of the Top Ten Most Influential Hispanic-Canadians. Martha's work has been widely anthologized in Mexico and within the Hispanic-Canadian community in Canada. She was part of the editorial committee of the very successful anthology Historias de Toronto (Toronto Stories. Lugar Comun, Ottawa, 2016).
