Hurricane Season

Melchor’s English-language debut is a portrait of a Mexican village as unnerving and entrancing as any painting by Bruegel or Bosch. The scene opens on the village's outskirts, its resident Witch found murdered and floating in a ditch. Chapter by chapter, Melchor shifts focus from one inhabitant to another, edging closer to the why, how, and who of the crime. She trains her lens on the most anguished and the pages overflow with their torrential voices: the abused and the abusers, as well as complicit bystanders. Yet all are to be pitied—all prisoners of their hellish social-scape. Melchor alludes to drug gangs, political corruption, racial tensions, heavy-handed religion, and economic exploitation, but the true devils are machismo and misogyny that have metastasized until they engender rampant femicide and devour their hosts. A maelstrom of language that demands to be heard, Hurricane Season is currently on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, which awards both author and translator. And it’s already won a spot on my personal Top 10 of 2020.