What Remains Book Launch

What Remains Launch: Brais Lamela in conversation with Jacob Rogers, introduced by Catherine Barbour

Join us as we celebrate the launch of What Remains (Winner of Ojo Crítico Prize 2023, Named Galician Best Book of the Year by El País), the captivating debut from contemporary Galician author Brais Lamela, translated into English by Jacob Rogers.

Mark your calendars for an evening of literature in translation as we share discussion, readings (in English & Galician), and perhaps even a few glasses of wine!

Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase before/after the event or pre-order now to be the first to get your hands on a copy: What Remains - Bullaun Press

About the Book

'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 towards nowhere.'

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. What Remains follows a young Galician student researching this vast project of forced resettlement by the Franco regime. 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.

About the Author

Brais Lamela, born in 1994, lives between Galicia and New York.

A PhD candidate at Yale, his work centres on comparative literature, cultural history, and critical thought.

What Remains is his debut novel. The first Galician-language book to win the prestigious Ojo Crítico Prize (2023), it has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, and now for the first time, English.

About the Translator

Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish.

He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and he has helped coordinate features of Galician literature for Asymptote, Words Without Borders, and The Riveter.

Published translations include Manuel Rivas’ The Last Days of Terranova (Archipelago Books, 2022) and Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones (3TimesRebel Press, 2023). He has translations forthcoming from Sublunary Editions and Archipelago Books.

Endorsements

‘A gorgeous, haunting novel, for fans of Ayşegül Savaş and Sigrid Nunez; it made me think a lot about different concepts of home, belonging, attachment and nationhood.’ Sara Baume

‘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 Paris

‘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

‘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, author of Take What You Need

‘[NINGUEN QUEDA] reflects on the dark corners of the idea of progress, on the forms of dispossession, and also on contemporary precariousness and homelessness.’ Irene Vallejo, author of Papyrus

‘With a vocationally hybrid text, between essay and autofiction, Lamela drags us in the footsteps of the colonization plan of A Terra Chá in the 1950s.’ Dolores Vilavedra, El País

FREE EVENT, ALL ARE WELCOME!

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