"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 Meniz, 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 Meniz, 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.

Named Galician Best Book of the Year by Babelia/El País, What Remains won the 2022 Spanish National Critics' Award in Fiction and the 2023 RNE Ojo Crítico Prize for the best novel by an author under forty in Spain.

Brais Lamela is a writer in Galician and a PhD candidate at Yale University. What Remains (published in Galician in 2022 as Ninguén Queda) is his first novel. It won the 2022 Spanish National Critics' Award in Fiction and the 2023 RNE Ojo Crítico Prize for the best novel by an author under forty in Spain. Lamela lives in New York City.

"This spare, transfixing novel pulled me in immediately. Its understated power, its driving questions about the future of rural communities in a changing world, brought to mind Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen. Jacob Rogers's subtle translation is an ideal match for the sensibility of Lamela's writing in this stunning book." — Idra Novey

"Immensely impressed & moved by this beautiful debut novel by Brais Lamela." — Garth Greenwell

"What Remains blends personal and historical, archive and memory, forms of habitation and migration. This important novel announces a major new voice in Galician literature." — Daniel Saldaña

"A masterful first book. A novel at a crossroads of times, places, and genres, one that invites profound thought and intense feeling. A fiction made up of real histories, where the author interweaves, with migrant threads, the personal and the societal. It's the local written with a universal spirit." — Manuel Rivas