Remote Islands (216 pages) is Ignacio Vidal Portabales’s fourth novel in the Galician language and won the García Barros Award in 2022. It is divided into two parts and seven chapters.

In the first chapter, Cata and Luci are sisters. They are in a tiny apartment with only two rooms, narrow like a toy train. They are waiting for their father to arrive. They talk about their mother being in heaven and wonder whether to go up to the attic so their mother can hear them more clearly. They have recently moved to Columbia from Galicia, but haven’t started school yet because their father doesn’t have enough money. They are a little afraid of him. When he arrives, he is drunk and has red lipstick on his shirt. He is better in the morning when he doesn’t slur his words. When their father is out, the girls go to visit their Columbian friend Juan Camilo, who is ten, like Cata. He has just received some money and takes the girls to have an ice cream, only the third time in his life he has done this. Before ordering their ice cream, they watch a boy and a girl also having ice cream, to see who will end up soiling their shirt less. The boy wins. Juan Camilo leads them back to their apartment. Their father has to water down the milk to prepare the girls’ breakfast because there isn’t enough in the fridge. He goes for an interview to work as a manual labourer and is hired because the man interviewing him is from Zamora, while he is from Ourense, so they’re neighbours. He warns him not to drink before work. On the way home, the girls’ father arranges to meet a woman he likes. He suggests they go dancing before they have sex, because he would like there to be intimacy between them. He loves his daughters, but when he thinks about their mother, he doesn’t love them so much.

In the second chapter, Catuxa’s life in Galicia is a disaster. She prefers to live in the shadows and finds it difficult to get up in the morning. Her marriage to Mateo has come to an end. Her relationship with her sister, Lucía, is problematic. She writes haikus to express her disappointment. She writes, “My house wounded me. I wanted to flee, on foot or on horseback. The relationship with my sister Lucía was abnormal.” They used to run a boutique. Lucía would do the accounts and Catuxa would buy in the merchandise, but they got into trouble with their creditors and had to close it. They opened an online shop selling teas instead. Catuxa moved in with her sister, who was also divorced from her husband, Xacobe. Lucía criticizes her for fraternizing with their customers too much. Their problems are seemingly solved when they inherit a house and 300,000 euros from their uncle Carlos in Peregrina. They go to visit the parish priest, Don Elías, who tells them about a young woman called Elisa who lives on their uncle’s property and hands them an envelope their uncle left in his safekeeping.

In the third chapter, Cata and Luci have a television at home. Cata avoids fighting over the remote control, she waits until Luci has had enough before taking it. They are both starving. They guess their father has forgotten to ask the woman on the second floor to prepare them some food. They go out in search of Juan Camilo. He leaves with a man in an area where there are hostels and rooms for rent. He comes back with some money and buys them some bread, which they share by the river. He says the man asked him to smoke, but prefers not to say how he earned the money. Their father returns from being with the woman. With his new job starting the following Friday, he is determined to improve their situation. He goes out to buy food and arranges with the woman on the second floor for her to cook lunch for the children. He buys the overalls he will need for work. He likes the women in this country – they listen to him and are content with very little. He goes dancing with the woman again and fancies that he is in love. On his first day at work, he causes an accident with the excavator, after having a swig of alcohol. The bottle he is drinking from smashes in the cabin, and the foreman realizes what is going on. He gives him one last warning and tells him to take the afternoon off. The man goes to the cinema and carries on drinking. He then goes to a park. The girls set out in search of Juan Camilo and again see him dealing with men in the street. They wonder how he makes his money, and whether they can do the same. They decide if they cannot, they will become shopkeepers and sell tea. Their father has a snooze in the park. When he wakes up, his wallet has gone. He glimpses a doll floating on the water nearby and retrieves it in order to give it to the girls, but as he turns around, he loses his footing and hits his head on a rock. The girls are waiting at home. Three days go by. The woman from the second floor, Mariana, brings them food and gives them a kettle to play with, since they like to pretend they are making tea. She has problems of her own – a husband who drinks, two children with difficulties. When she goes upstairs, she spots smoke coming from the door of the girls’ apartment and sees the cable of the kettle has got wet and the kettle has short-circuited. She takes the girls to her own apartment and calls the local council to inform them about the missing father.

The second part of the book begins with chapter four. In the letter from their uncle Carlos, Catuxa and Lucía learn that he expects them to look after Elisa, whoever this woman may be (he doesn’t clarify their relationship). Catuxa finds it easier to forget their mother, who left them one day, but Lucía has difficulty forgiving her. On their way to visit their uncle Carlos’s house in Peregrina, they are convinced that the house will be in urgent need of repairs, but when they arrive, they find that it is in very good condition. They meet Elisa, who tells them that she will need a couple of days to gather her things and leave. She then tells them her story – how her husband, a manual labourer, used to beat her, how he used to sleep with other women, how he used to take money from the till of the herbalist’s shop she ran, how she decided to leave him and he went away with their daughters, who were ten and eight at the time. She also tells them how their uncle Carlos died, while away in Africa, trying to help people who required medical attention. She is just sad that his project involving a new building on the property will not now come to fruition. They ask her what this project is. Back in Sarela, where they live, the two sisters discuss their divorces and why their marriages failed and then take the decision to move to the house in Peregrina.

In the fifth chapter, Catuxa and Lucía are at home packing boxes for their move to Peregrina. Lucía has three boxes belonging to her ex-husband (who left her for a work colleague, who was pregnant, something Lucía had wanted very much for their relationship) and feels unable to throw them out. Catuxa says that she will do it, imagining that the boxes belong to her ex-husband, Mateo, but in the end they decide to store them in the attic. Catuxa tries to pick out a book to read. She passes over a course for Windows, a guide to Oviedo and Gijón, and a biography of St Teresa of Ávila, and opts for the novella “A Story of the Days to Come” by H. G. Wells. The two sisters decide to help Elisa recover her daughters. One of their clients in the online shop selling teas is a police inspector, Estevo. Catuxa resolves to enlist his help. She explains that Elisa’s husband, a manual labourer, took the daughters, named Catalina and Lucinda, to South America two years previously. There is a lot of construction work in South America, says the inspector, but he will do what he can to obtain information as to their whereabouts.

In the sixth chapter, Catuxa declares that she feels “hurt” after her separation from her husband, while Lucía is “lost”. Catuxa thinks that the three of them – the two sisters and Elisa – have all suffered something in common. She has enlisted the help of another customer, Gabriela, who has a motorboat, to get rid of the three boxes belonging to Lucía’s ex, Xacobe. Those boxes are now at the bottom of the bay. They decide that they are going to continue with their uncle Carlos’s project for the new building in Peregrina, which used to be the north wing of the house.

In the seventh chapter, Catuxa receives a phone call from the inspector, who has located the two girls in Bogotá. They are in an orphanage called Dawn. He explains that their father died in an accident when he slipped next to a river. Lucía begins to see similarities between their own childhood and that of the two girls in Columbia. The two sisters agree that they will continue with their uncle Carlos’s project, which is to use the building next to the house as a shelter for women recovering from alcohol abuse. They think that Elisa will make an excellent manager. Meanwhile, they will live in the main house. Cata and Luci return to Galicia from Columbia to live in Peregrina, and they bring Juan Camilo with them. They are particularly sensitive to small creatures and are given a Golden Retriever puppy by the inspector. At the inauguration of the new shelter, Catuxa and Lucía invite an old flame of their uncle’s, Clara, and it is as if their uncle is with them. They are sure that he would be proud of them. Catuxa goes back to painting and receives a new laptop from her sister. The time on her old computer was set for an atoll in the Pacific, Kiritimati, but she decides to set the time on her new computer for Galicia, as if by doing this she is returning to the present. Lucía seems to have come to terms with their mother leaving them, because she found them strange, because she found everything strange, and the two sisters have reached a new level of harmony living with Elisa and the children in the house in Peregrina.

This is a smooth and rich narrative that relates the lives of sisters on different sides of the Atlantic, only to bring them together through the introduction of Elisa, the Columbian girls’ mother (who was supposed to be dead) and a friend of the Galician sisters’ uncle Carlos. It also offers a route out of suffering for Juan Camilo, who endured far too much for a child of his age. Despite the failure of their marriages (they wonder if they had ceased to be seductive enough for their husbands or had expected too much from them), by the end of the narrative the two sisters have acquired a certain peace, which they are able to share with the new people in their lives. Remote Islands received the García Barros Award, one of three major literary awards for novels in Galicia.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne