Author(s): Fernanda Melchor

Novel | Translated fiction | Mexico | Fiction Reductions

Author of the acclaimed novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor leads us into a different kind of hell- paradise. 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.

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 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 *

'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 *

'The 'elemental cry' of Ms. Melchor's writing voice, a composite of anger and anguish, is entirely her own.' * Wall Street Journal *

'Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.' * New York Times *

Author Biography:

Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as 'one of Mexico's most exciting new voices' (Guardian). She won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season, which has also been longlisted for the National Book Award, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Mexico.

Sophie Hughes has translated works by Laia Jufresa and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. Her translation of Alia Trabucco Zeran's The Remainder was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and her translation of Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.