Remember Me

THREE 5-STAR REVIEWS FROM READERS FAVORITE

"An incredibly well-written debut… This is an author to watch out for." —Readers Favorite

"The relationships unfold naturally… a story about genuine people attempting to make sense of the world around them." —Readers Favorite

"The settings are pure cinema." —Readers Favorite

A tender and heartrending love story between two men, a grieving American and a Venezuelan migrant the world refuses to see, divided by borders and set in Bogotá in 2017 against the collapse of Venezuela: a searing gay literary debut for readers of Garth Greenwell, Ocean Vuong, Patricia Engel, and Madeline Miller.

Gabriel DiPaulo never got to take back the last cruel words he said to his closest friend. Days later, a fire took him. Eleven months on, Gabriel is nine days from a flight home. Then a fruit seller in Plaza de Bolívar presses two mangoes into his empty hands, refuses his money, and holds his gaze a second too long. Mateo Alonso is twenty-seven, a migrant who crossed out of Venezuela with a hundred dollars and no passport. One afternoon becomes a habit, then a visit to the room Mateo rents, then the beginning of something neither man will name. Mateo sees him without pity, and Gabriel sees him back, and for the first time since the fire he stops counting the exits. But everything Mateo has is borrowed, and Gabriel has a return ticket.

Back in Chicago, distance does nothing Gabriel needs it to do. Two months later, he still feels Mateo in every room he walks into, and Gabriel fears he is already losing him. In Bogotá, Mateos health is failing faster than he can afford to stop working, and he will not tell Gabriel what is wrong. What Gabriel can give without thinking, Mateo cannot take without cost. When Mateo turns back toward the country he fled, Gabriel does the reckless thing and follows him across a border he has no legal right to cross. No stamp in his passport. No record that he was ever there. No lawful way to leave.

Shifting from the exhilaration of nine days to the long ache of leaving and being left, Remember Me is a love story set inside the largest displacement crisis in Latin Americas modern history, and a reckoning with the voice Gabriel has carried since the fire: You could have saved him. Intimate, devastating, and unforgettable, Abraham Randalls "hauntingly beautiful debut" (NewInBooks) is a novel about being seen completely by someone the world keeps looking past, and the two words one of them will spend a lifetime keeping.