Thank you so much @fitzcarraldoeditions for my free ARC of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor which I just finished this morning. This exactly the kind of book I love - dark, gritty, disturbing.
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The translation by Sophie Hughes is a dream! It must have been so difficult to translate as Melchor does not believe in paragraphs or regular sentence lengths - they can go on for half a page or more but you can’t stop reading, it results in this fevered reading experience where you just read and read, continually more repulsed and yet you cannot stop reading...
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It’s set in a small village in Mexico, after the local ‘Witch’ is found dead and the whole village becomes involved in the investigation of her murder. The chapters are divided into different narrators, each one as unreliable as the last, and each horrifying the reader with some new act of depravity or brutality. If you like your characters broken, damaged, or with absolutely no moral compass to speak of then you’ll be in for a treat with Hurricane Season!
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Anger and pain pervade this novel and seep into the bones of the reader, making this one an unforgettable novel. It’s perverse, pushes boundaries, and utterly transports the reader to this remote village forgotten by society.
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Not for the fainthearted, but a dark gem of a book