Author(s): Fernanda Melchor; Sophie Hughes

Novel | Translated fiction | Mexico | Fitzcarraldo Editions

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasises about seducing his neighbour--an attractive married woman and mother--while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener in the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Facing the impossibility of getting what they think they deserve, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.

Melchor is a thrilling writer, her electric prose charged with the power to transform the reader. Paradais explores the explosive nature of Mexico's brittle society, fractured by issues of race, class and violence--and confronts us with teenagers whose desires and hardships can tear life apart.

Review:

'Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon's precision for cruelty. Paradais is a short inexorable descent into Hell.'
- Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

'Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.'
- Julian Lucas, New York Times

'With a nimble command of the novel's technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, [Paradais and Hurricane Season] navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex. And they establish Melchor, who was born in 1982, as the latest of Faulkner's Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable.'
- Juan Gabriel Vasquez, New Yorker

'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.'
- Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

'A masterpiece of concision ... Paradais is a labyrinthine monologue on the banal violence of a modern-day teenager.'
- Virginie Despentes, author of Vernon Subutex

'Melchor uses shock to lay bare issues of classism, misogyny, and the ravages of child abuse. Her prose, ably translated by Hughes, is dizzying but effective; it's as if she's holding the reader's head and daring them to look away from the social problems she brings to light. This might be a deeply disconcerting novel, but it's also a brave one. A fever dream that's as hard to read as it is brilliant.'
- Kirkus

Prizes: Long-listed for International Booker Prize 2022 (UK).

Author Biography:

Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is 'one of Mexico's most exciting new voices' (Guardian). Her novel Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book.