Brais Lamela’s debut novel, What Remains , opens with a lecture on forensic architecture that the novel’s narrator, a Galician PhD student living in New York, is only half listening to as he helps himself to a second serving at the lunch buffet. His attention often drifts between concerns about his dissertation, life in the city, and his increasingly serious relationship with his girlfriend, Mariana. Only later, waiting at a bus stop, does he return to the lecture and wonder: “Is it really possible to restore what’s been lost, to reconstruct places that no longer exist for the displaced, and in the process achieve some sort of justice, or at least alleviate their grief?”

The question might just as easily be asked of the narrator’s own research, which concerns a little-known episode of Spanish history: the displacement of rural communities in Galicia under Franco’s dictatorship, when villages were submerged to create hydroelectric reservoirs and their inhabitants relocated to newly constructed settlements.…