THE LONE WOMAN is a story of a 37-year-old, divorced, unnamed (and therefore nameless) woman imprisoned for terrorist activities on behalf of Etarra, the Basque separatist movement better known as the ETA. This is her first day out of prison after a four-year stretch, and when we meet her she has just left the hotel where she in turn has left a man she picked up during a night of drinking. She has nowhere to go, and that being the case she has no alternative than to go home—home to Bilboa in the Basque country, her homeland. The shortest passage between her prison stint (and possible criminal charges for cutting up her date the previous night) and her former life is on a bus, and it is over the course of this journey that we learn that story of her life, and possibly of its end.

But the beauty of Atxaga’s writing is that the action of the novel, spirited as it is, is never as absorbing as the mental drama. Of course, what is suspense if it’s not psychological? Bernardo Atxaga’s THE LONE WOMAN, as his companion book THE LONE MAN, delves into fear, oppression, our inner lives, and how we arrive at the choices that we make. It is also about prisons: only the kind in which you are shut up but also those into which we lock ourselves. The ex-con of THE LONE WOMAN—scared, confused, touching and very human—is caught between those two confines, and within their interplay is something of and for all of us.

Rose Marie Morse, President; Sam Truitt, Vice President

Morse Partners 50 East 80th Street, Suite 2 New York, NY 10021 Tele: 212-988-1197 Fax: 212-517-5652

In THE LONE WOMAN we meet through her ruminations her former cellmates the clairvoyant Margarita and the troublesome Antonia; both her siren, dead lover Larrea, killed in an ETA action, and ex-husband Andoni; two nuns girded with angelic mercies; her bloated, one-night-stand thug left bleeding a Madrid hotel room; and the cops on her trail dragging to the surface her former life in all its menacing and deadly detail. We also meet, by way of quotation, Carl Sandburg, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, The Smiths, Stevenson, Stendhal and anonymous Basque singers. Cornered in a bus for eight hours, all these voices and figures come together to reiterate with great force and veracity this Basque woman’s life in all its sadness, resignation, betrayal.

Bernardo Atxaga, a literary and cultural hero to the Basques, casts in THE LONE WOMAN a sascination, penetrating look into the dynamics the words freedom, nation, oppression and servitude trigger in a people. His sympathy is with those individuals ground down between the jagged borders of countries; and into those individuals Atxaga breathes a brave and unique culture.

—Bernardo Atxaga

For more information, author photograph or to interview the author or publisher, please contact Rose Marie Morse or Sam Truitt, Morse Partners, at 212-988-1197 or via email rosemarie1@msn.com.