Published for the first time in 1971, Forty Lost Years tells the captivating story of Laura Vidal, a working-class woman who becomes a high-fashion dressmaker to the bourgeois ladies of Barcelona during Franco’s dictatorship. Beginning in 1931, with the proclamation of the Republic, and ending in the 1970s, Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s masterpiece paints a vivid picture of forty years in Catalan history. Weaving the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years is a bitter tale that immerses readers into the frivolous atmosphere of a sexually liberal republican Barcelona, and the despair of a country defeated by the Fascists.