No Turning Back

Barcelona, 1986: The dictatorship is over and life is free and easy. But what if you can’t forget the seventies?
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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? Is there really no turning back?

 "Followers of contemporary Spanish history … will now have the opportunity to understand some of its complex factors … through Falcón’s unswerving critical appraisal of Spanish politics. … No Turning Back guarantees that the memory of clandestine resistance is no longer consigned to the past or to scholars.”

—from the critical introduction by Linda Gould Levine