A modern-day bildungsroman, featuring a brave woman on a quest to discover her family history as she is torn between the US and Madrid, the old world and the new.
Madrid, 1960s. Marieta is a brilliant young student who is spirited across the Atlantic to the United States by a magnetic professor. Romance ensues, and a baby is born. But the professor disappears from Marieta's life as mysteriously as he appeared. Left alone with her little girl, Lola, Marieta must decide whether to forge ahead in a new country or to return to her strict, upper-class Catholic family in Spain with her daughter. Though the pair travel back and forth repeatedly, Marieta ultimately chooses self-reliance and raises her daughter in New England.
As Lola grows, she feels trapped between two countries-the old world and the new-as well as two languages, and she never ceases to look for her absent father. Lola becomes a historian and embarks on a quest to seek out the history of her family origins in order to truly understand herself. Who was her father? How does she fit in to the United States, Spain, or anywhere else?
Told with humor, candor, and grit, Madrid Again is a highly original bildungsroman and an homage to the haunting power of history and how it shapes a young woman's identity.
