The Cartographer’s Daughter

Elena Marsh

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Venice, 1580, and a girl who finishes her father’s maps in secret. Lush and clever historical fiction.

Ruth Okafor

Co-owner · fiction buyer

$27

Hardcover

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Format

Hardcover

Pages

416

Published

2025

Publisher

Harbor & Vale

ISBN

978-0-00-720979-7

In sixteenth-century Venice, Isabella Ferro secretly completes her blind father’s maps, until a commission from the Doge puts both their lives at risk.

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The Cartographer’s Daughter

Chapter one

The Cartographer’s Daughter

Every map is a promise that the world will stay still.

Elena Marsh

My father drew the world, and I drew the parts of it he could no longer see.

By the winter of 1580 his eyes had gone cloudy, like water in a glass left out overnight. He could still tell the coast of Dalmatia from the coast of Crete by touch, running his fingertips over the copper plates, but the fine work, the rivers and the little towns, had become mine.

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