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Forthcoming,
    May 5, 2009, Unbridled Books

    >>Click
    here
    to be notified when the book
    is available.



    Dear Reader,



    Be prepared for
    a surprise.
    The Last
    Prince of the Mexican Empire is not a novel about a Mexico
    you’ve seen on the news, in tourist brochures, travel memoirs,
    nor in almost any other work of fiction. This is a Mexico of palaces, of pine
    forests, harpsichords, Arab daggers, and Viennese bonbons, a
    long ago Mexico when the ex-Archduke of Austria, Maximilian von
    Habsburg, sat on the "cactus" throne, invited by a
    clique of Mexican conservatives, blessed by the Pope, backed
    by the French Imperial Army— and opposed, in a struggle-the-death,
    by the Mexican Republic’s President Benito Juárez
    and his ally, the United States.

    
A sweeping epic that
    takes you from a palace ball to an orphanage kitchen, from Brussels
    to Yucatan, the White House to the Tuileries to the flank of
    a snow-dusted Mexican volcano, The
    Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is also, and always,
    a story about a tiny boy, only two and half-years old, whose
    Mexican diplomat father and American mother agreed to give him
    up to Maximilian, to become, so they had supposed, heir apparent
    to the throne.

    
A fairytale based on
    the true but never before completely told story— the work
    of seven years of travel and research in archives as far flung
    as Vienna, Washington DC, and Mexico City— it begins, as
    it must, with, "Once upon a time..."

    
C.M.
    Mayo

    
P.S. I invite you to
    visit the novel's
    web page, where you can read an excerpt from the first chapter,
    about the prince’s mother, née Alice Green of Rosedale,
    Washington DC. You will also find extensive notes on the characters,
    genealogies, a bibliography, a cornucopia of photographs, and
    "From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion,"
    a memoir of my own journey from Mexico City to Maximilian’s
    perfectly preserved Italian castle.

    
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