Hurricane Season

Longlist, National Book Awards 2020 for Translated Literature

ISBN 9780811228039
New Directions
Author photo of Fernanda Melchor. (Photo credit: Maj Lindstrom)
Fernanda Melchor

Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and was a New York Times Notable Book. More about this author >

Sophie Hughes (Photo credit: Alex Zucker)
Sophie Hughes

Sophie Hughes is a British literary translator who primarily translates from Spanish to English. She has translated more than a dozen books, including the works of José Revueltas and Enrique Vila-Matas for New Directions. More about this author >

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From the publisher:

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 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 Bolaño’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.

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