Goodbye, Ramona

Three women in one Barcelona family share the name Ramona, and Montserrat Roig's novel follows them across more than sixty years of the twentieth century. The eldest Ramona lives a quiet married life with a husband who means well, while longing for the romance and adventure she finds in the nineteenth-century novels she loves. Her daughter, Ramona Ventura, spends her days absorbing her husband's moods and sudden aggression. The youngest Ramona falls for a university student whose progressive politics sit awkwardly beside the condescension he shows her.

What links the three is silence. Each keeps her real feelings about the men around her to herself, and each says nothing about the violence of Franco's dictatorship or about her own hopes and ambitions. The youngest, though, comes of age in the 1960s, when Barcelona is on the edge of upheaval and women are starting to claim some control over their lives. The question the book poses is whether she can escape the pattern set by the women before her and build a life around what makes her happy.

Goodbye, Ramona is a rich portrait of Barcelona's society across the century, and a story about love, power and the hold that family keeps on us long after we leave it. Roig is a leading figure of Catalan literature, and this edition brings the novel back into print with an introduction by Catherine Lacey.