Book cover for The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán
2019 Released
3-4 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Coffee House PressISBN 9781566895583
Translated by Sophie Hughes

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.

Alia Trabucco Zerán

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Chile in 1983. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University and she holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from University College London. Her debut novel, The Remainder was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2019. Her non-fiction title, When Women Kill won the British Academy Book Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the National Books Critics Circle Criticism Award, and film rights have been sold. Her latest novel, Clean, is being translated into 15 languages. She won the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award 2024 for her next project. She lives in Santiago.

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Sophie Hughes

Translated by

Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty books from Spanish. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times, and in 2021 she won the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize. Her work has featured in the New York Times, The Paris Review, the Guardian, Granta, frieze and The White Review.

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