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Product Description The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONALER LITERATURPREIS 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 “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, Bookforum “Hurricane Season condemns violence ― especially sexual violence ― by depicting it unflinchingly, in scenes and language that make Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy seem tame. This is a novel that sinks like lead to the bottom of the soul and remains there, its images full of color, its characters alive and raging against their fate.” - Amanda Dennis, Los Angeles Review of Book “Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season is so strange, wild, and foul-mouthed that I almost missed the sharp critiques embedded in the story. A mix of drugs, sex, mythology, small-town desperation, poverty, and superstition, this novel spreads like a fungus from the dark center of the literary space where crime fiction and horror meet. Melchor is the witch and this novel is a powerful spell.” - Gabino Iglesias, NPR “Melchor’s English-language debut is a furious vortex of voices that swirl around a murder in a provincial Mexican town. Forceful, frenzied, violent, and uncompromising, Melchor’s depiction of a town ogling its own destruction is a powder keg that ignites on the first page and sustains its intense, explosive heat until its final sentence.” - Publishers Weekly “ Hurricane Season remains a powerful experience for the way its cruelty becomes, improbably, and before our eyes, a form of radically intransigent egalitarianism. ” - Sydney Review of Books “"A brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. A formidable debut."” - Anthony Cummins, The Guardian “A dazzling novel and the English-language debut of one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices.” - Marta Bausells, The Guardian “ Hurricane Season is a Gulf Coast noir from four characters’ perspectives, each circling a murder more closely than the last. Melchor has an exceptional gift for ventriloquism, as does her translator, Sophie Hughes, who skillfully meets the challenge posed by a novel so rich in idiosyncratic voices. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive” - Julian Lucas, The New York Times “This is the Mexico of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Roberto Bolano’s 2666, where the extremes of evil create a pummeling, hyper-realistic effect. But the 'elemental cry; of Ms. Melchor’s writing voice, a composite of anger and anguish, is entirely her own. ” - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal “Written with pain