Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes)

Fernanda Melchor’s formidable portrait of Mexico & its demons, is written with a brutal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling. Translated by Sophie Hughes.Hurricane Season opens with the macabre discovery of a decomposing body on the outskirts of a village in rural Mexico. The body is that of the local witch, feared by the men but relied upon by the women for love charms and illegal abortions. The book soon transcends its whodunnit constraints: the culprits are named early on in the story. The questions shift from who to why, as Melchor paints a portrait of lives governed by poverty & violence, machismo & misogyny, superstition & prejudice. Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology & violence — real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying & more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it. 'Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal, Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village & reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. This is an inquiry into the sexual terrorism & terror of broken men. This is a work of both mystery & critique. Most recent fiction seems anaemic by comparison.' - 2020 International Booker Prize JudgesFernanda Melchor, born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, is a writer & journalist who lives & works in Puebla. She has written the non-fiction book Aquí no es Miami & the novels Falsa liebre, Temporada de huracanes y Paradais. Sophie Hughes has translated novels by several contemporary Latin American & Spanish authors, including Laia Jufresa & Rodrigo Hasbún. Her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, Hurricane Season , Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by Sophie Hughes. 'Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal, Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village and reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. This is an inquiry into the sexual terrorism and terror of broken men. This is a work of both mystery and critique. Most recent fiction seems anaemic by comparison.' Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of contemporary Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by the award-winning translator Sophie Hughes. 'Hurricane Season' opens with the macabre discovery of a decomposing body in a small waterway on the outskirts of La Matosa, a village in rural Mexico