The Remainder

"Santiago, Chile. The city is covered in ash. Three children of ex-militants are facing a past they can neither remember nor forget. Felipe sees dead bodies on every corner in the city, counting them up in an obsessive quest to square these figures with the official death toll. He is searching for the perfect zero, a life with no remainder. Iquela and Paloma, too, are searching for a way to live on. When the body of Paloma's mother is lost in transit, the three take a hearse and a bottle of pisco up the cordillera for a road trip with a difference. Intense, intelligent, and extraordinarily sensitive to the shape and weight of words, this remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of a pain that stretches across generations"--

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.