Hurricane Season

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 e...

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.

Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican writer. She was born in Veracruz in 1982. She is the author of the novel Falsa liebre (2013) and the chronicle book Aquí no es Miami (2013). She is a journalist graduated from the University of Veracruz and a teacher in Aesthetics and Art from the Autonomous University of Puebla. Some of her stories and articles have been published in journals such...

Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican writer. She was born in Veracruz in 1982. She is the author of the novel Falsa liebre (2013) and the chronicle book Aquí no es Miami (2013). She is a journalist graduated from the University of Veracruz and a teacher in Aesthetics and Art from the Autonomous University of Puebla. Some of her stories and articles have been published in journals such as Replicante, Letras Libres, GQ and Vice, as well as in the anthology Mexico 20. New Voices, Old traditions (Pushkin press, 2015). In 2013 she was recognized by the magazine La tempestad as the emerging writer of the year in the Mexican literary scene, and in 2015 by the Conaculta, the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the most outstanding under forty-year-old writers in her country.