Once I Am Back

From the internationally best-selling author Marco Balzano, a powerful and delicate novel that reveals an often-unspoken chapter of Italian and world history: that of the White Orphans.
For thirty years now, two thirds of the world’s migrants have been women. Yet, despite this fact, migration continues to be
talked about as an essentially male issue and as if the world was still that of the post-war period, in which thousands and
thousands of arms were used for mines, fields, factories.

Once I Am Back speaks of a vast and silent army of women, that of caregivers, telling the story of Daniela, who leaves
Romania to reach Milan and offer her children a better future, thus giving up watching them grow. In Milan she becomes
invisible: a foreigner in a city of strangers, no longer a woman, no longer a mother, just an assistant, a servant. Months turn
into years, and Daniela no longer belongs anywhere.
When her youngest son - the favorite one, the one she was told she couldn’t have - ends up in a coma after a motorcycle
accident that sadly resembles a cry for help, Daniela returns to Romania, trying to mend wounds that have been bleeding for
years. The story of a complicated but inseparable bond, the love of a mother for her child and the sacrifices that we are willing to
do for the people we care about.