Hurricane Season

The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers

Winner of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute's Tanslation PrizeLonglisted for the National Book AwardShortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the Internationaler LiteraturpreisNew York Public Library Best Books of 2020 Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020

 

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. 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.

Like Roberto Bolaño’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.