I wanted to write a chronicle of the presentation of Laetitia Colombani's new novel, Laetitia Colombani, A Day Without Women (La Magrana / Salamandra, 2026), without using the verb to braid. I try a few times and give up. It’s not that I’m 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 that structure with which she found success. Let me explain the success: Colombani published her first novel, The Braid, nearly ten years ago, which was an immediate global phenomenon and which, with 8 million copies sold in forty languages, changed her life.