Cleopatra Dismounts

An enchanting, audacious retelling of the Cleopatra story from a Mexican novelist who is “a luminous writer” and “a masterful spinner of the fantastic” (The Miami Herald).

In Cleopatra Dismounts, Carmen Boullosa has written a remarkable imaginary life of one of history’s most legendary women. Dying in Marc Antony’s arms, Cleopatra bewails the end of her political career throughout ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Mediterranean. But is this weak woman the true Cleopatra?

Through the intervention of Cleopatra’s scribe and informer Diomedes, Boullosa creates two deliriously wild other lives for the young monarch—a girl escaping the intrigues of royal society to disguise herself and take up residence with a band of pirates; and the young queen who is carried across the sea on the back of a magical bull, to live among the Amazons.

Magical, multifaceted, and rippling with luminous imagination, Cleopatra Dismounts confirms Carmen Boullosa as an important international voice.

“Wildly entertaining.” —The Washington Post

“A highly appealing and poetic interpretation of the Egyptian queen’s doomed fate.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“The Mexican fabulist Carmen Boullosa reinvents Cleopatra as a character for modern feminism to conjure with.” —The Boston Globe