The Remainder - by Alia Trabucco Zerán (Paperback)

About the Book

Felipe, Iquela, and Paloma, young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile's dictatorship. The body of Paloma's mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations. Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

Book Synopsis

A coffin, a camera, a bottle of pisco: three friends embark on a road trip through the Andes to confront a history they can neither remember nor forget.

Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile's dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela's childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents' violent militant past. The body of Paloma's mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Remainder

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
A Vanity Fair Best Book of 2019An Entropy Best Book of 2019
A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2019
A Kirkus Best Fiction in Translation of 2019

"A lyrical evocation of Chile's lost generation, trying ever more desperately to escape their parents' political shadow." -Man Booker International Judges' Citation

"Deeply compelling." --The Guardian

"The second-generation trauma narrative gets a Chilean spin in Zeráaacute;n's intense novel of interior monologues, which is Faulknerian in themes, structure, and style." --Vulture

"A mesmerizing, roaming look at intergenerational trauma, told in a specific and surreal style that shimmers and shifts on the page and in the mind." --Nylon

"Truly stunning, full of deft turns of phrase." --The Los Angeles Times

"While writers such as Pedro Lemebel and Joséeacute; Donoso have explored the regime's impact on those who lived through it, Zerán is concerned with the next generation." --TIME

"A haunted novel, awash with sinister and elegiac moods. It stands as a testament to the way the past can unsettle us." --The Star Tribune

"Zerán seamlessly alternates between the voices of Iquela and Felipe, highlighting the opposing and gendered ways they have reacted to the circumstances of their childhood." --Times Literary Supplement

"A literary kaleidoscope." --Spectator

"Trabucco Zerán urges readers to value subtext just as much as the 'official' narrative . . . a smart, vivid, and richly layered story." --Adroit Journal

"Intense and haunting, The Remainder is a startling reckoning with the history of violence." --Book Riot

"A perfect companion book to last year's Empty Set, another sparse and brilliant Latin American novel with an experimental structure from the same publisher." --The Chicago Tribune

"The Remainder controls a remarkable range of registers (it is, by turns, lyrical, elegiac, sensual, funny, tragic). This novel is sure to endure." --Edmundo Paz Soldán

"A powerful, impressive novel, dotted with scenes that are as unique as they are unforgettable." --Lina Meruane

"A fundamental book about what it means to mourn the past, about the remainders of a history that refuses to be forgotten. This is the debut we all wish we had written." --Carlos Fonseca

About the Author

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Chile in 1983. She holds an MFA in creative writing in Spanish from New York University and a PhD in Latin American Studies from University College London. La Resta (The Remainder) was chosen by El País as one of its top ten debuts of 2015 and was granted a Best Literary Work Award from the Chilean Council for the Arts. She is also the author of Las homicidas, a non-fiction book about women who kill.

Sophie Hughes is an award-winning translator from Spanish. She has been the recipient of an American PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and in 2018 she was announced as one of the Arts Foundation 25th anniversary fellows for her contribution to the field of literary translation.