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. Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream 'Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.'Īvni Doshi, Guardian Best Books of 2020 'A sprawling, heaving thing, and I loved it because I have no idea how Fernanda Melchor was able to write it. ' Hurricane Season is a Gulf Coast noir from four characters' perspectives, each circling a murder more closely than the last. Melchor has an exceptional gift for ventriloquism, as does her translator, Sophie Hughes, who skillfully meets the challenge posed by a novel so rich in idiosyncratic voices. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings. ' Hurricane Season is, first and foremost, a horror story-its horror coming from rather than contrasting with the lyricism of Melchor's prose Melchor's kaleidoscope keeps circling around the untold source of the horrors, and we are increasingly keen to unveil it. Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, New York Review of Books Sophie Hughes's translation renders the expansive, punishing spirit of Mexican slang so impressively that one wonders whether the harsher sounds of English in fact suit the novel better.' This is an effect of the structure of the novel as much as of its writing. '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.

Hurricane season novel review