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Novel Writers: Alia Trabucco Zerán

The Remainder

Novel Writers: Alia Trabucco Zerán

The Remainder

Alia Trabucco Zeran, The Remainder

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Alia Trabucco Zerán introuducs her debut novel, The Remainder

Three children of ex-militants count the cost of dictatorship and generational trauma in this brilliant debut from Chile’s brightest new writer.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler was interviewed for our Novel Writers: The Warm Up podcast

“The final chapter... has a soaring ecstasy that comes closer to anything I can recall to describing how it feels to fly like a bird.” – Lee Langley, The Spectator

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 of 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.

The Remainder is translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes, winner of the English Pen Award.

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. La Resta (The Remainder), her debut novel, won the prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work awarded by the Chilean Council for the Arts in 2014, and on publication was chosen by El País as one of its top ten debuts of 2015.

Novel Writers

Each month we invite a debut novelist to read from and talk about their work in an informal setting. Prior knowledge of the text is not essential. Topics of discussion include theme, structure, inspiration and the craft of writing. These sessions are a great way to discover new writing talent and great books.

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