What Remains

“I wonder where everyone is going, where we’re moving to, if there’s some concrete destination, or if our only fate is this constant wandering, this movement toward nowhere.”

Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered mountains of Negueira de Muñiz, What Remains follows a young Galician student researching the Franco regime’s vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muñiz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn “backward” country people into modern cattle farmers.

Amid the weight of unsettling archival documents, the voices of the displaced, and a sweltering New York summer, the unnamed narrator discovers the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace. As he pieces together her strange fate, he confronts his own temporary status in a foreign land and wonders what it means to call a place home.

Intimate and dreamlike, What Remains is a meditation on the ruins of memory and an urgent exploration of identity, colonialism, and resistance. Inventively blending memoir, fiction, anthropology, and travel writing, the novel investigates, with surprising intuition, the traces left in the places we inhabit.

Translated by Jacob Rogers.

• Best Novel of the Year (Premio El Ojo Crítico), 2023
• Spanish National Critics Award Best Book Published in Galician, 2023
• Galician Best Book of the Year (Babelia/El País), 2023

Forthcoming in June