About

Alessandro Catorcini

History keeps a short guest list. It remembers the admiral and forgets the man who caulked his hull. It remembers the battle and forgets the soldier who lived through it and had to go home. I write about the people left off the list: the soldiers, the shipwrights, the clerks and the chartmakers, and the moments when their skill decided more than they meant it to.

I was born in Genoa, and I come by the subject honestly. My paternal grandmother was born a Vivaldi, in Riomaggiore in 1904. Her branch was a cadet line of the old Genoese Vivaldi family, and she kept talking about a family almanac going back to the early 1300s. So when I wrote about Ugolino Vivaldi sailing out of Genoa in 1291 to find the Indies by sea, I was writing about someone the family had been talking about for a very long time.

These days I live in Bellevue, Washington, where I work as a technology executive. I studied Latin and Greek in school and fell for the classical world then. The novels are what that crush turned into. I write in Italian and English, and other languages follow as each edition is ready.

The Ocean Sea, and a siege

The Western Passage opens The Ocean Sea. Genoa, 1291: every spice from the Indies reaches the West through a chain of hands, and every hand takes its cut. Ugolino Vivaldi means to sail around the whole chain, out through the Strait and down the coast of Africa. The idea was right. The ship was wrong.

An Imperfect Reckoning is a love story set in the siege of Carcassonne in 1209. Azalaïs keeps her father's accounts. Jehan, a carpenter's son, reads the ground for the crusader army. They ought to be enemies. Instead, each turns out to be the only person who understands how the siege works.

The Genoese Triptych

These are three novels about three pivotal moments in the history of the Mediterranean, each told by one of the unaware actors. The Master of the Adze follows a shipwright who can see the true line in a piece of oak but not what he is building. He will join the Crusade and go all the way to free Jerusalem. The Master of the Seal is set in besieged Caffa in 1343: he saved everyone, and that was the catastrophe. The Master of the Ledger follows a clerk in Pera in 1453, across the water from Constantinople, whose figures are all true. That is how the thing was done. The three books share one uncomfortable idea: being excellent at your work can be what damns you and those around you.

The Shield Triptych: The Men Rome Forgot

Three standalone novels share a single object, the shield, along with what it means to carry one, lose one, or watch one outlast the man who carried it. The Hammer and the Shield follows a young engineer who watches the sea take his father and brother. He then spends the First Punic War building a fleet that can survive that sea. In The Shield Left Behind, a survivor of Cannae carries his disgrace through fourteen years and all the way to Zama, where he will learn whether he ran or only survived. The Farthest Shield takes one soldier from the disaster at Carrhae on a forty-year march east to the Han frontier. You can read them in any order.

The Mapmaker's Son

This is a historical adventure series set in Seville in 1491. Antonio Pera, called Falco, is the son of a mapmaker who escaped the fall of Constantinople with nothing but a bronze falcon brooch. Falco draws charts in the years when charts are worth killing for. The Mapmaker's Son, Volume I is forthcoming.

Where to start

Start in a cell in Seville. The Stranger in the Cell is the first episode of The Mapmaker's Son: two killers, one cell, and the night everything begins. It's $0.99, and it's the quickest way to find out whether we'll get along.

Start with The Stranger in the Cell →

Keeping in touch

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