Barcelona, 1986: The dictatorship is over and life is free and easy. But what if you can't forget the seventies? Elisa's troubled past comes back to her in the form of her ex-husband, Arnau, who needs her help to exonerate a former comrade. Elisa relives her Catholic childhood, her marriage to Arnau, her blind loyalty to the communist cause, her experiments in feminism, and her prison time to create a twentieth-century emotional history of the political Left in Spain. The women who faced so much adversity with Elisa weave their own perspectives and testimonies into hers, making this more than a novel: it's an important contribution to history that gives a voice to the silenced. Can Elisa ever leave the path history has carved out for her? Or is there no turning back? "Followers of contemporary Spanish history ... will now have the opportunity to understand some of its complex factors ... through Falc n's unswerving critical appraisal of Spanish politics. ... Knauss's agile and eloquent translation guarantees that the memory of clandestine resistance is no longer consigned to the past or to scholars." -from the introduction by Linda Gould Levine, PhD