Return to Eden (2024)

Roca's most personal book grows out of a single old photograph of his mother, Antonia, at a beach picnic as a teenager. From it he rebuilds her family's overcrowded apartment in Valencia and the poverty, nationalism and black-market corruption of Franco's Spain, as seen by a girl who kept hoping for better days. It pairs naturally with Ana Penyas's We're All Just Fine: two portraits of the women who lived through the dictatorship, one warm and panoramic, the other spare and collage-built. Fantagraphics published it in English in 2024, and it won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2025.