Confusion and Death of Mara Balteira

A witch who helps Mara Balteira, a famous courtesan in the court of Alfonso X of Castile; a man who cannot love his wife because of another lover's jealousy; a nun who falls for the man of her dreams; a mermaid who is condemned to eternal youth ("Being unable to grow old is like not being alive, like writing a book in the sand on the beach"); a nobleman whose lover is cursed by her mother and turns into a she-wolf; a witch working incognito in a discotheque in Barcelona; a mulatta from the Caribbean who disembarks one day in Corua; a sorceress who is forbidden to fall in love; two women waiting for an abortion; a town clock's ability to warn people by striking twelve with eleven and a half strokes; a female academic in the company of women from history; a shepherd under the spell of a sorceress with three faces; a grandmother who tells her granddaughter to count sheep, or seahorses, or sea shells... In the thirteen stories that make up Confusion and Death of Mara Balteira, Lugo writer Marica Campo weaves together the threads of myth and historical fact to create a garment that, like a magic cloak, transports the reader to the high forests and glens of Galicia in north-west Spain, a land shrouded in mystery and an integral part of the Celtic fringe.

Marica Campo has previously published the novel Memoir for Xoana, a violinist's conversation with her unborn daughter, also in Kathleen March's translation. Kathleen March is a renowned Galician specialist and the translator of important Galician authors into English.