The Mapmaker's Confession: Majorca and the Catalan coast, 1450 to 1460

Majorca, 1455. Every chart is a confession. Siona Cresques inherits her father's workshop and the private notation system that has made his charts the most accurate in the Mediterranean. The cipher encodes more than coordinates. It carries the oral navigation traditions of Jewish, Muslim, and Catalan sailors, gathered across three generations of a converso family that kept its knowledge alive by never writing it down plainly. The Portuguese crown wants her charts for its southern voyages. The Aragonese tribunal's notary wants to know why her father's maps carry Arabic place names. Siona must decide whether to simplify the charts and make them useful, or preserve them intact and risk proving that the Cresques family never fully gave up what it was told to give up. The Mapmaker's Confession is the second volume of The Century of Silence, following The Physician's Proof. Drawing on the cartographic tradition of the Cresques family and the Majorcan school, the novel is about inherited knowledge, the quiet workshop as the last refuge of outlawed learning, and the price a woman pays when tradition is passed to her. Perfect for readers of: Amin Maalouf, Leo Africanus Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book Dolores Redondo, All This I Will Give to You Ildefonso Falcones, Cathedral of the Sea