In case we return one day, the new novel by María Dueñas

On March 26th, writer María Dueñas's highly anticipated novel, "Por si un día volvemos," will arrive in Spanish bookstores. It will be available in Mexico starting April 1st. Readers can purchase the book in physical format and as an e-book.

The elements that characterize the author's successful works, such as historical migratory movements, the experience of an unexpected journey, and stories of courageous women, are presented once again in this new narrative.

The novel is set in Oran in the 1920s. In this African city of Arab origin, a Spanish pulse, and under French administration, a young woman with the false name of Cecilia Canal lands. She appears to be crossing the Mediterranean to escape poverty, like many of her fellow countrymen. However, her true motive is even more heartbreaking.

I fled from an unintentional crime.

I fled from the men who didn't love me.

I fled from a war.

This is my story, between Spain and Oran, along the Mediterranean.

The urgency of survival forces Cecilia to work her heart out on plantations and in wash houses, working as a domestic worker and factory worker on a piecework basis. Until one early morning, during her daily routine at the Bastos tobacco factory, she becomes involved in a crime for which she pays with her submission to a despicable being. The fortitude and strength that this woman possesses help her free herself and give her the courage to reinvent herself and embark on a new path of advancement over three vibrant decades.

This is the story of a feisty, charismatic, and admirable woman who lived through the colonial boom and the controversial end of French Algeria. At the same time, its pages revive the memory of the unknown Spanish pieds-noirs who, swept away by emigration and exile, were part of that world.

The Spanish writer expresses her joy at this new publication, her sixth book, “between the reality of a complex time and the fiction of a literary character, its pages take us to Oran, in French Algeria, off the southeastern coast of Spain: a colonial territory to which scores of Spaniards moved as emigrants or exiles. They would become known as pieds-noirs after independence.

Writing it has been an exciting project: guided by its protagonist, Cecilia Belmonte—who later would also be Cecilia Lagarde and Cecilia Aubert—I have been moved and learned, I have reconstructed a world that disappeared and I have understood some of the intricacies, sometimes luminous and often murky, of the human condition.”

The author

María Dueñas was born in Puertollano, Ciudad Real. She holds a PhD in English Philology. After two decades dedicated to academic life, she entered the literary world in 2009 with resounding success when she published The Time in Between, a novel that became a publishing phenomenon and whose television adaptation by Antena 3 garnered numerous awards and spectacular ratings. She then followed this with Mission Oblivion (2012), Temperance (2015), The Captain's Daughters (2018), and Sira (2021), which continued to captivate readers and critics. Translated into more than thirty-five languages, with millions of copies sold worldwide, María Dueñas has become one of the most beloved authors in Spain and Latin America.