Hurricane Season

Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of contemporary Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by the award-winning translator Sophie Hughes.

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. Rumours 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, Fernanda 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.

Through the stories of Luismi, Norma, Brando and Munra, Fernanda Melchor paints a portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice.

Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or William 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.