Foreign Rights & Submissions

She is a Sardinian fisherwoman who dreams of stealing a galleon, becoming a pirate, and escaping a violent husband. He is the Grand Inquisitor of the Crown of Spain. And women like her, he burns alive.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi meets The Bone Ships, with the Inquisition-era darkness of Bardugo's The Familiar, and for readers who loved the heist-and-found-family of The Lies of Locke Lamora.

In 1630s Sardinia, being a witch is a death sentence. So is not being one, and acting like one. Fiammetta should have just kept quiet and obeyed, like all the other women on her dismal island. Instead, for years, she has been preparing her escape: a galleon bought in secret from a Genoese merchant, a crew of battered wives, and the wild dream of becoming the most feared pirate captain in the Mediterranean.

When Stellina, a little girl possessed by a Zipa spirit, promises to lead her to the buried treasure of a legendary Sardinian pirate, Fiammetta thinks she has found her chance. But Ambrosio, the brooding witch-hunter of the Holy Inquisition, is on the girl's trail too. Now Fiammetta and her ragtag crew have one choice: reach the treasure before the Spaniards do, or pay with their freedom and their blood.

Across three books the trilogy widens from comic-bawdy first-person picaresque into a dual-POV historical fantasy in the register-shifting tradition of Joe Abercrombie's First Law. Fiammetta's irreverent voice sits alongside darker chapters as the Inquisition closes in, the magical economy of Spanish gold reveals its cost, and the trilogy's feminist undertones and depictions of gender violence sharpen into focus.