M MONTONARA The Parchment & Spirit Series
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Cádiz, 1492 · A novel · Coming December 2026

In a city ruled by ink, one signature decides who may stay.

When Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand sign a royal decree forcing Spain’s Jews to convert or leave, a young healer must choose between exile and the baptismal font, and between the woman she was and the one the city will allow her to become.

Cover of Between Worlds by M Montonara: a woman in a 15th-century cloak stands between the harbor and the white city of Cádiz

The story

A new name. An old faith. An ocean between them.

Cádiz, 1492. Nothing enters this harbor city without documentation, and nothing leaves without being named. Now a decree from the Alhambra has given the Jews of Castile and Aragón a choice: leave everything behind, or kneel at the font and stay.

Ya’el has spent her girlhood balancing her father’s debt book and learning to heal at the side of Ali, a Muslim physician who treats every patient regardless of creed. As her family’s world is liquidated into coins and passage, she makes the choice no one expected of her, and receives a name she does not yet know how to wear.

But in a city of watchful neighbors, a baptism is only the beginning of being seen. And when Alonso de Santillán, a merchant’s nephew who noticed her too closely, is ordered to sail for the new colony of Hispaniola, the crossing ahead may carry her farther from herself, or closer, than she ever imagined.

Spanning five centuries, from the harbor of Cádiz to a hidden grave on the Cuban shore, Between Worlds is a story of faith kept in secret, healing across borders, and a woman who refused to disappear.

What waits inside

Two worlds. One life written across both.

The Decree

Rooted in the real Alhambra Decree of 1492. Cádiz, a city of ledgers, gates and whispering neighbors, becomes a character of its own, where paper decides whether a life can continue in the open.

The Healer’s Hands

Taught by a Muslim physician who has worked beside Christians, Jews and Moors alike, Ya’el carries a skill that heals across every border, in a kingdom now sorting its people by creed.

The Crossing

From the docks of Cádiz to the new colony of Hispaniola, and centuries later to the Cuban coast, where a girl finds a forgotten grave and a small star carved where only the patient would look.

“In Cádiz, paper did not merely record a life. It decided whether that life could continue in the open.”

From Chapter One

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The history behind the story

Letters on the real decree, the conversos, and the lives that official records left out.

A first look

Sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes research, and invitations to read an advance copy.

A launch-day reward

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M Montonara

About the author

M Montonara

Between Worlds was inspired by the Cuban lineage of the author’s wife, and by the memory that some families carried for five centuries without always naming it: in recipes, in candles lit a certain way, in names that shifted only slightly, and in signs hidden in plain sight.

The author lives in the Southeastern United States, and as a lifetime student of history, he has always been fascinated with those periods in history marked by great change. The time period of this story is one such time. We hope you will enjoy journeying through time to a period of great upheaval.

Some stories survive only because someone keeps them.

Join the First Readers Circle for the first three chapters, free, and be first in line when Between Worlds arrives on Kindle and in soft cover.