Red Emma’s

Three women from the same family—grandmother, mother, and daughter, all named Ramona—come to life in the pages of Montserrat Roig’s Goodbye, Ramona. The eldest Ramona lives quietly with her well-meaning husband, but longs for the romance and adventure of her favorite nineteenth-century novels. Years later, her daughter, Ramona Ventura, finds herself constantly enduring her husband’s mood swings and aggressive outbursts. The youngest Ramona falls for a university student whose progressive ideals are undercut by his condescending treatment of her. Each woman, in her own time and in her own way, lives her life in silence: their true feelings about the men in their lives, the violence of Franco’s dictatorship, and their dreams and aspirations, all go unspoken.

But the youngest Ramona is lucky enough to be growing up in a Barcelona on the brink of revolution, in the 1960s, when women are finally beginning to claim agency. Will she break free from the fate of the women who came before her and build a life centered on her own happiness?

Goodbye, Ramona is an unforgettable social mosaic of Barcelona across the twentieth century, and a universal, powerhouse story of love, power, and the lasting influence that family holds over all of us.

Meg Berkobien, PhD, is an educator, organizer, and translator from Catalan and Spanish. She currently works as a bookseller at the radical, worker-owned and operated bookstore and coffeehouse Red Emma's in Baltimore, MD.

María Cristina Hall is a Mexican American poet and a migration researcher at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM). She wrote the bilingual poetry collection Raw Age / La hora cruda (Dharma Books).

Together, the pair have co-translated The Left Parenthesis (Open Letter Books), Chrysalis, Pastoral in B Minor, and September and the Night (both for Fum d’Estampa Press). They also edited an issue of Absinthe (University of Michigan), compiling contemporary women’s Catalan fiction.