The Remainder
by Alia Trabucco Zeran
(And Other Stories, £10)

AT LEAST 3,000 people are officially recognised as disappeared or killed in Chile between 1973 and 1990, after the armed forces headed by General Augusto Pinochet took power from the elected government of president Salvador Allende in a bloody military coup.

[[{"fid":"10317","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]The brutal regime was also responsible for the imprisonment and torture of around 40,000 survivors. Thousands of them and relatives of those disappeared still search for truth, justice and reparation and The Remainder, a debut novel by the young Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zeran, tells the story of three broken children of former militants.

Felipe, Iquela and Paloma, now adult, live in an almost surreal Santiago smothered in ash from a volcanic eruption, as they try to make sense of Chile’s bloody past.

Dark, disturbing yet devastatingly beautiful, it’s a novel filled with vivid imagery, drawing the reader into the lives of the three young protagonists and their journey of self-discovery in a country where they are haunted by a history of military dictatorship that overshadows their lives.

Felipe, who narrates his own experiences in a dream-like stream of consciousness, sees dead bodies everywhere. He is slowly whittling their numbers down until he finds the remainder of the book’s title, while translator Iquela is obsessed with her friend Paloma, who has comes to Chile from Germany — where her family had emigrated after the military coup — to finally bury her dead mother, Ingrid.

The trio of protagonists end up on a road trip crossing the coastal mountain range in a borrowed hearse to wait for the body of Ingrid, diverted to Argentina because of the fallen ash and bad weather.

The allegorical story of these three young Chileans facing a past that they cannot forget, grows ever more hallucinatory and surreal as the body of Ingrid becomes more elusive and, as the narrative progresses and ash rains down, it too become more obscured and hazy: “Perhaps the grey is just the backdrop of my memory,” Iquela comments.

In a novel exploring the big themes of repatriation, inherited memories and living in the aftermath of violence and oppression, the final pages when Felipe finally comes face to face with the multitude of Chile’s exiled dead are a real tour de force.

A highly recommended debut from one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary Latin American literature.