United States
![Fernanda Melchor - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07MH855BM.jpg)
Hurricane Season
The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers
Longlisted for the National Book Award
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis
New York Public Library Best Books of 2020
Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020
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.
Longlisted for the National Book Award
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis
New York Public Library Best Books of 2020
Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020
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.
Editorial Reviews
"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
"Stomach-churning, molar-grinding, nightmare-inducing, and extraordinarily clear-eyed account of the ordinary horrors men inflict upon women. Melchor refuses to look away, refuses to indulge in fantasy or levity―even in the moments when the novel is laugh-out-loud funny. And lest the far-off reader think the horror is contained to the lives of others, Melchor repeatedly th...
― 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
"Stomach-churning, molar-grinding, nightmare-inducing, and extraordinarily clear-eyed account of the ordinary horrors men inflict upon women. Melchor refuses to look away, refuses to indulge in fantasy or levity―even in the moments when the novel is laugh-out-loud funny. And lest the far-off reader think the horror is contained to the lives of others, Melchor repeatedly th...
Readers Top Reviews
HLeuschelSigismund A
This is a brutally honest novel about the precarious situation among the poor Mexican population where the vicious cycle between depravity, prostitution, drug addiction and smuggling is parallel with the presence of huge levels of violence and hopelessness. It's a very sad book despite the occasional glimpse of empathy and attempts of community care. Powerful and brave!
Jstaf
The talent of the author is apparent from the start, immediately provoking thoughts of Bolano. The characters were human, bad and good, trying to survive in a poor area run by criminals and overrun with tragedy and sadness. Like 2666 this book has parts that are hard to read, but it helps those who have first world problems understand a little better the weight crushing poverty is on people.
rjamesanapurna
The book embodies squalor, degradation, violence, corruption and exploitation. It has a deeply buried, thin plotline which is incidental to the depravity of the depiction. The language is fascinating even though lurid. Reviews report that the author considered writing this as nonfiction. She should have. This is not in the vein of Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck or Franz Fanon.
Duane Schneider
The comparisons of "Hurricane Season" to Faulkner are inevitable and apt. Here, Melchor has created a fictional village (somewhere along the central Mexican coast?), long swirling sentences, a series of unreliable narrators, and a jumbled chronology. But whereas Faulkner's language was erudite and sometimes obscure, Melchor's is simple and often profane. It is the plainspoken language of the characters, who are marginally employed (sometimes as prostitutes), crippled, sometimes vicious, struggling to survive. There is no money. The characters are sweaty and unclean. Men prey on women and on each other violently and sexually. Drugs are plentiful. Men are physically assaulted in jail by the jailers and the fellow inmates. The novel begins with the death of The Witch, a transvestite abortionist who throws parties in the rundown mansion where she lives. She is rumored to have inherited large sums of money, which may have served as motive for her murder. She casts a pall over the novel, and the town. Luismi is a man in a gang who takes in a young teen, Norma, perhaps to hide his homosexual history with an oil company Engineer who is stringing him along. Norma escaped the house where she was impregnated by her stepfather. Brando is a member of Luismi's gang who secretly lusts after Luismi, but while homosexual acts are practiced and abided by the gang for extra money or drugs, true homosexuality appears to be a death sentence. Sex with whomever is present seems an escape from the characters' squalid circumstances. The swirling structure of the book masterfully mimics the swirling form of a hurricane. But the heat wave and drought in the town drive characters crazy, and the frenzy is only relieved by the beginnings of a rainstorm at the book's conclusion. There's no redemption here for anyone, only corruption.
VICKI HERBERT
No spoilers. 4 1/2 stars. This story isn't for everybody... I'm going to start off with the warnings: graphic sex and violence on almost every page and rampant profanity... The story begins with the dead body of a small Mexican town's resident witch discovered floating in an irrigation canal... The story then digresses and we are given several accounts about what led up to the witch's murder and about the witch itself... The accounts are brutally direct and unflinching which can leave some readers feeling abused and beaten up themselves... If you find yourself slowing to view a bad traffic accident, you'll probably find this a good read because it allows the reader to view the most Intimate and gut-wrenching details... If I had to describe this novel overall: it was like reading about one big multi-layered orgy... of every variety... and then some... Some readers may not like the author's style of using long, looooooong sentences but if you stick with it you'll soon learn how to break them at the commas. I removed half a star due to the avalanche of profanity. If you can take the content, the story is very thought-provoking. Read this story to understand why the witch had to die (and who's zoomin' who).
