Books and Series

Books

Paris Bohemian

In Belle Époque Paris, two starving bohemians Erik Satie and Claude Debussy meet in a chance encounter at an occult bookstore, and find instant rapport and musical kinship. Having been expelled from the Conservatoire, the young Satie plays piano at a Montmartre cabaret, Le Chat Noir; reveling in the creative license the arts’ Mecca affords. Debussy has just returned after three disappointing years of study as winner of France’s highest musical honor, the Prix de Rome. He’s stifled by the limits of tradition and hungers for inspiration. Satie spurs Debussy to experiment with unconventional sounds, and they launch a turbulent crusade against the stale academic institutions and narrow-minded journalists that keep a strangle hold on French music. The friendship between the two young men provides solace as they struggle to find their way forward. With Satie’s encouragement, Debussy takes an unorthodox risk and composes his landmark achievement, Afternoon of a Faun, leaving Satie to harbor a silent envy and fear of inadequacy. Debussy offers to promote Satie by orchestrating one of his compositions, getting it performed at a major venue, and bringing Satie new acclaim. But their friendship becomes tainted by unspoken rivalry and competition. The relationship is nearly destroyed when Satie suspects that Debussy has plagiarized his work. Satie struggles to keep himself from sinking into a pit of angry despair. Can he earn his place in a flourishing epoch and compose a triumph for the ages, or will he falter on the rocks of ridicule and his personal demons?

Series

The Lost Tales of Sepharad is an historical novel series set in the early Renaissance. It follows the multigenerational journey of the Déulocresca family of Sephardic Jews. They flee the Inquisition from Barcelona to the Holy Land, to islands of the Mediterranean and beyond, in a search of peace, hope, and at chance at prosperity.

Heirs of the Tide

The Holy Land, 1515. A young Sephardic Jew, Yonatan Déulocresca can’t resist the allure of a wager. With few opportunities to advance, it seems the only way to change his fortune as a lowly donkey herder. But his lucrative win ignites the wrath of the vicious crime lord, known as the Hyena, al Dabaa. He abducts Yonatan’s father Joachim, along with a group of European pilgrims they were guiding to sacred sites. Unless Yonatan pays a ransom triple the amount of his winnings, al Dabaa will execute the hostages. In desperation, Yonatan and his brother Aaron embark on a voyage to recover a secret cache of family assets. According to their father’s decades old journal, he hid this trove on an island in the Mediterranean, after his ship went aground. But he could never return for it. A family friend introduces the brothers to Captain Gabriel Coron and his indomitable crew of Sephardic corsairs. With a letter of marque from the Ottoman Sultan, this band of Jewish pirates seeks justice and restitution for the losses suffered at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of all Jews in 1492 by royals Isabel and Ferdinand. Completely inexperienced as sea hands, the two Déulocresca heirs must prove their mettle aboard the corsair vessel, La Represalia. Only if they help seize a Spanish ship and its spoils will these corsairs help them in return. Can they find and reclaim their inheritance to free their father? Or will the pirates, the sea, or the Spanish claim their lives first?

City of Liars

In 1487, young navigator Joachim Déulocresca yearns to shed his reputation as a smuggler, rise above his scorned status as a Jew, and make an honorable name for himself in the maritime trade of Barcelona. But when a kindly patriarch who loves him like a son is burned at the stake for heresy, it compels Joachim to ply his talent for deception to mount an underground rescue mission. He enlists two allies and together conspires to smuggle Inquisition targets to safety by sea. Fearing the Inquisition’s looming threat, wealthy spice merchant Joan Bautista hires Joachim to pilot his new caravel and transport his assets out of Spain. Bautista’s daughter Aularia draws Joachim into a forbidden relationship. She joins his covert alliance to rescue fugitives, but in the process she discovers her parents’ crypto-Jewish heritage and her own precarious future. Aularia lives in the shadow of a hidden menace. Her tutor and personal confessor Friar Miguel Cirera is an Inquisition spy. Joachim and his allies succeed at first, but their activities bring reprisals at the hands of the sinister fraternity, the Santa Hermandad. Joachim sinks deeper into a quagmire of fraud, bribery, and kidnapping to protect the ones he loves and those destined to burn at the stake. As their plans unravel, Aularia and Joachim become fugitives themselves, losing everything.

How will they find the courage and perseverance to survive, reunite, and escape to freedom?

Available as e-book, audiobook, and paperback.

Michelle Fogle, Author