Just Imagine, Merche!

Auria is almost fifteen. In the summer of 1991, she bumps into the parish priest, Salvador, on a street of her home town. During the month of August, he is organizing a pilgrimage lasting twenty-two days to Czstochowa, a city in Poland, to celebrate World Youth Day. Auria is taken aback when he invites her to join the pilgrimage, but when her mother supports the idea, she decides to take a risk. Her mother, Lusa, works as a seamstress and is always telling Auria not to make the same mistakes she did, getting pregnant when she was only eighteen and having to raise a child on her own. There's no danger of that, thinks Auria. She has no interest whatsoever in men. But this new trip - which will take in such places as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Venice - will bring her into close contact with Paio, Salvador's cousin once removed, and what was previously unthinkable may actually happen, she may actually experience all the intensity of first love. Auria shares all the events of that fateful summer with her diary, her new best friend, a diary she decides to call Merche. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young adult fiction and is the recipient of the Spanish National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her novel Dove and Cut Throat, a charming story about a boy who gets bullied at school and who is torn between the two girls in his life - a classmate, Halima, and a girl he has met on the Internet, Dove - is also published in English by Small Stations Press.