What Remains

A moving meditation on what is left in our wake. What Remains is a short book that touches lightly on big subjects: migration, colonialism, the urban-rural divide, identity, cultural curation and the meaning of home. Using elements of anthropology, essay and memoir, this is modern fiction, which demands to be read on its own striking terms.

Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered Galician mountains, What Remains follows a young 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 Muniz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn ''backward'' country people into modern cattle farmers. As the narrator pieces together the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace, 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.