Staff Pick
It must be said: Fernanda Melchor isn't playing nice. Hurricane Season is a Mexican murder mystery with its jaundiced eye cast toward a community locked in the throes of cataclysmic turmoil. No mere crime procedural, this English-language debut gives an unrelenting account of the pandemonium as it metastasizes and mutates in real time, eventually culminating in an eruption of scorched-earth depravity from which there can be no escape. An unholy work of superstition, sadism, and all-out immolation. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers.
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse — by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals — propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence — real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.
Review
"Propelled by a violent
lyricism and stunning immediacy, Hurricane Season maps out a landscape
in which social corrosion acquires a mythical shape. This masterful
portrayal of contemporary Mexico, so vertiginous and bewitching it pulls
you into its spiritual abyss from the opening page, is brilliantly
rendered into English by Sophie Hughes. Fernanda Melchor is a remarkable
talent." Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters
Review
"Melchor wields a sentence
like a saber. She never flinches in the bold, precise strokes of
Hurricane Season. In prose as precise and breathtaking as it is
unsettling, Melchor has crafted an unprecedented novel about femicide in
Mexico and how poverty and extreme power imbalances lead to violence
everywhere." Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
Review
"One of Mexico's most
promising and prominent writers — Melchor writes of lives with
specificity, with a crude recognition of their humanity that allows, if
not for redemption or hope for those lives, at least some measure of
peace for their dead. Virtuosic prose." Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Bookforum
About the Author
Fernanda Melchor, born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. Her collection This Is Not Miami is also forthcoming from New Directions.
Sophie Hughes has translated such Spanish-language writers as Iván Repila, Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbún, José Revueltas, Giuseppe Caputo, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Alia Trabucco Zerán.