The Remainder

Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

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.

"A centrifugal story of death, history, and mathematics . . . a debut that leaves the reader wanting more." Kirkus

"You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays a crippling hand on the generation that follows political catastrophe; shift the focus and you're plunged into a darkly comic road trip with a hungover trio in an empty hearse chasing a lost coffin across the Andes cordillera." The Spectator

"This novel is vividly rooted in Chile, yet the quests at its heart — to witness and survive suffering, to put an intractable past to rest — are universally resonant." Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

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

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Chile in 1983. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for a masters in creative writing at New York University, where she wrote her debut novel La Resta (The Remainder). La Resta won the prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work awarded by the Consejo Nacional del Libro de Chile, and was chosen by El País as one of its top ten debuts of 2015. She lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD at University College London.

Sophie Hughes is an award-winning translator from Spanish and a literary critic with a particular interest in contemporary Latin American literature. She has been the recipient of a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship and residency, an American PEN Heim Literary Translation grant, and in 2018 she was announced as one of the "Arts Foundation 25" fellows.

The Remainder (trans. Sophie Hughes) is about three young Chileans trying to come to terms with their parents’ violent past under the Pinochet dictatorship...

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