December 2025

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Dear Friends and Readers,

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I am delighted to share news of a new book, Carlota—a novel that has lived with me for a long time, waiting for its moment to speak.

 

Carlota of Belgium is remembered by history as Empress of Mexico, but also, more painfully, as a woman whose life unraveled in the shadow of imperial ambition. Brilliant, multilingual, and fiercely idealistic, she entered marriage and empire with conviction—and emerged into exile, loss, and a solitude that would last nearly six decades.

 

Carlota traces her journey from the refined courts of Europe to the luminous terraces of Miramare and onward to the volatile promise of Mexico. It is a story shaped not only by politics and power, but by inner weather: love, faith, hope, and the slow, devastating erosion of certainty. At its heart stands a woman whose intelligence and resolve could not protect her from the human cost of history.

 

This novel is not written as a judgment, but as an act of listening—an attempt to restore voice and complexity to a figure too often reduced to tragedy alone. Through Carlota’s eyes, we glimpse the seduction of ideals, the fragility of empires, and the quiet resilience that persists even when everything else has been stripped away.

 

I hope Carlota will speak to readers who are drawn to historical fiction that is intimate rather than grandiose, reflective rather than declarative—a novel that lingers, asking what remains when power fades and memory becomes the final territory of sovereignty.

 

Thank you, as always, for reading, for your curiosity, and for accompanying me on this journey through history and imagination.

 

With gratitude,
Andrea Fuchs Petzi