Tú también eres extraña

In 1974, a Chilean girl arrives in Rome with her family. The daughter of a leftist leader persecuted by Pinochet's dictatorship, her childhood unfolds amidst suitcases, safe-conduct passes, and unanswerable questions: Where are you from? What's Chile like? What are you doing here? In this coming-of-age novel, María José Viera-Gallo reconstructs the experience of exile from the perspective of someone growing up divided between two languages ​​and two worlds. Rome is not the backdrop for a Roman holiday, but the stark reality of survival: no-star hotels near Termini station, silent convents, immigration offices, damp apartments where uncertainty and hope mingle. Yet the characters know that this is precisely what makes them fortunate: they have lost their country, their social class, and their political aspirations, but not their lives. While the adults establish anti-fascist resistance centers, translate testimonies of horror, and dream of returning, the protagonist and her sisters learn to speak Italian, to conceal their shame at being different, and to answer the phone as if they were speaking to a lost past. You Too Are a Stranger is the story of an identity in transition. A tale where the collective epic of exile coexists with the smallest details of domestic life, and where family memory is woven between the hope of return and the relief of having escaped.