Remember Me

A man carrying a fire he won't outrun. A Venezuelan refugee who knows the price of starting over. A connection that was never meant to follow them home.

What does it mean to love someone who is already disappearing?

For readers of Ocean Vuong, André Aciman, and Patricia Engel, Remember Me is a novel of longing, exile, and the charged intimacy of being seen in ways that cannot be undone.

Gabriel fled Chicago after the fire, desperate to escape the grief and restlessness hollowing out his life. In Bogotá, staying with an ex-lover, he plans to keep himself safe, distant, and temporary. Then he meets Mateo.

Mateo Alonso left Venezuela searching for a future he could still believe in. Now surviving on the margins of Bogotá, he has learned to live with uncertainty without surrendering his pride. Beneath his restraint is a steadiness Gabriel cannot explain, and a way of seeing him that makes distance harder to maintain.

What should have been a passing encounter becomes a pattern of return. Gabriel keeps seeking Mateo out, and each meeting draws them further across the distance between their lives. For Gabriel, Bogotá can still be temporary. For Mateo, home is still entangled with the country he fled and the family he left there. The closer they become, the more those differences begin to shape what each man can ask of the other.

Back in Chicago, Gabriel tries to resume the life he left behind, only to find that distance has deepened what began between them. When Mateo turns toward Venezuela, Gabriel makes a reckless choice: he follows him into the country Mateo once fled, where devotion is tested against sacrifice, survival, and truths that threaten to alter everything.