'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.

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. Melchor’s English-language debut is a furious vortex of voices that swirl around a murder in a provincial Mexican town.

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo - New York Review of Books Sophie Hughes’s translation renders the expansive, punishing spirit of Mexican slang impressively. Instead of supplying a welcome breeze in the heat, the local river is where the children find the Witch’s body. Hurricane Season is, first and foremost, a horror story-its horror coming from rather than contrasting with the lyricism of Melchor’s prose. Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence-real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it. 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-inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable-forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder.

Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis New York Public Library Best Books of 2020 Winner of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute's Tanslation Prize The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers

Hurricane season book