Las Madrinas / The Godmothers

The 1960s. A striking mining region dismisses young Gloria Montes, who, pregnant and rejected by her family, leaves home never to return. A false passport, a cattle truck, and a Brussels address are all she has to offer. However, the class solidarity and generosity of the women she encounters along the way will change Gloria's destiny and lead her to a subversive Madrid struggling to stay afloat in the final years of the dictatorship. There, her path will cross with ghosts of the past: forbidden names, eccentric returning emigrants, unsavory journalists, Italian communists, clandestine love affairs, concentration camps, the novels of Luisa María Linares, a tour of Central Europe by Juanito Valderrama… And the eternal presence of Cleopatra, which, like the smoke that flows through the protagonist's veins, permeates this story of stories in which women help each other to survive. After her "Mining Trilogy", Aitana Castaño returns to narrative with an ambitious choral novel about the last decades of the dictatorship, which has as its backdrop an impassive post-war period whose wounds are still to be healed.