Les males dones

Through the pages of Las malas mujeres we embark on a hard and exciting journey through the final stretch of the 19th century, in a story with several voices: that of fifteen-year-old Sisca, imprisoned because women do not own her body ; those of Concepción Arenal, a prison visitor, and Juana de Vega, women not as well known as they deserve, and those of the "mute choir of bad women", who sing songs about encounters with sexual predators. The novel is written against oblivion, to recover the memory of the excluded, inmates in the prison of La Galera, Coruña, in 1863. At its center, the tension between the good intentions of Arenal, tinged with the identification between crime and sin, and the resistance of Sisca. It is also a hymn to the role of books and reading to dignify people's lives, to give hope to the desperate.