In 1974, a young Chilean girl arrives in Rome with her family. The daughter of a left-wing political leader persecuted by Pinochet's dictatorship, she spends her childhood surrounded by suitcases, travel documents, and impossible questions: Where are you from? What's Chile like? Why are you here?

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In this coming-of-age novel, María José Viera-Gallo captures the experience of exile through the eyes of a child growing up between two languages and two worlds. Rome is not the backdrop to a Roman Holiday, but the very real setting of survival: modest hotels near Termini Station, silent convents, immigration offices, and damp apartments where uncertainty mingles with hope.

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Yet the characters understand that this is precisely what makes them fortunate. They have lost their country, their social standing, and their political cause—but not their lives.

While the adults establish anti-fascist resistance centers, translate testimonies of state violence, and dream of returning home, the narrator and her sisters learn to speak Italian, to hide the shame of feeling different, and to answer the phone as though, on the other end of the line, they might encounter the past they had lost. Tu también eres extraña is the story of an identity in transit. A story where the collective epic of exile unfolds alongside the intimate rituals of everyday family life, and where memory is woven from both the hope of return and the relief of having escaped.

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With graceful, precise prose, María José Viera-Gallo transforms the experience of displacement into a meditation on memory, migration, and above all, the peculiar sorrow of belonging to a country one cannot truly long for because one has never known it.