An ablation every fifteen seconds and a woman murdered every ten minutes: can it be true?

BarcelonaI wanted to write a chronicle of the presentation of the new novel by Laetitia Colombani, A Day Without Women (La Magrana / Salamandra, 2026), without using the verb to braid. I try a few times and then give up. It is not that I am in a hurry to pull the ace of The Braid out of my sleeve to hook you into the article, but I have to use the simile of weaving and braiding because the author returns to the structure with which she found success. I explain the success: Colombani published her first novel, The Braid, almost ten years ago, which was an immediate global phenomenon and which, with 8 million copies sold in forty languages, changed her life.

The French author braids (now only metaphorically) the stories of four women from four continents who, after overcoming their personal misfortune, end up converging in a joint action, which the title already explains to us. The origin of the novel was discovering the strike that Icelandic women held in 1975 and which turned the island into "the most egalitarian country in the world". The hypothesis, after all, is what drives March 8th every year: what would happen if women all over the world went on strike? "They all have their particular motives. It is not the same for a sociology student in Iceland or a worker in a maquila in El Salvador, but we have all experienced discrimination or physical, sexual, legal, or workplace violence. I have not seen equality anywhere I have been. Even in Iceland, one in three crimes is a femicide," said Colombani to Mar Garcia Puig this Monday at La Casa del Llibre.

Social denunciation and emotional connection

Colombani's literary grace is that she can describe situations of truly appalling inequality with a luminous kindness. Here we have Michiko, who suffers the workplace harassment that women who are mothers are subjected to in Japan: seven out of ten resign when they become pregnant, despite having completed highly competitive studies and jobs. Then there is Hawa, a Senegalese woman who becomes a doctor in France but cannot overcome the mutilation of her childhood: 6,000 girls suffer from ablation every day on the African continent – one every fifteen seconds, a dozen while you read this article. Katla is the Icelandic girl who starts the feminist movement after losing her best friend at the hands of her boyfriend: a woman is murdered every ten minutes in the world at the hands of her partner or someone in her family. And Ana María is the self-sacrificing factory seamstress who is not only exploited at work, but whose daughter is also imprisoned: "In El Salvador and six other Central American countries, the prison sentence for an abortion is higher than for murder, from 30 to 50 years, even if it is involuntary. But they also have no access to contraceptives," the author explained.

If you add it all up, it causes an incredulous indignation. But the writer finds the right balance of social denunciation and emotional connection. She does not leave the characters alone, hitting their heads against reality, but accompanies them with people who love them and who act as lifelines. "It's a book about connection, like all my books. I like the idea that we are all connected," states the author of The Winners, who is now performing in the theater as the narrator of The Braid, which she adapted herself. In Catalonia, in addition to the 50,000 copies of the novel's translation, the theatrical version directed by Clara Segura had more than 90,000 spectators, which should have brought more of an audience to La Casa del Llibre... If it weren't for the fact that on Monday, Dolores Redondo was presenting her new work at the Teatre Condal and Mariana Enríquez at the Sarrià Library: things that happen. "In my books I explain harsh realities, but I need to put hope in them. I am an optimist –affirmed Colombani–. We have the urgency to change the world. I, at the very least, will have done my part".