Hurricane Season

‘[Melchor’s] sentences are sloping hills; her paragraphs, whole mountains. It’s no wonder that Melchor was dubbed a sort of south-of-the-border Faulkner for her baroque and often brutally harrowing tale of poverty, paranoia and murder.’

New York Times, 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

‘The book is at once repellent and transfixing. Sophie Hughes’s impressive translation meets a daunting challenge with energy and inventiveness; the rhythm of her prose matches the fervor of Melchor’s original.'

Sydney Review of Books

‘A brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles.’

Anthony Cummins, Guardian

‘Melchor’s English-language debut is a furious vortex of voices that swirl around a murder in a provincial Mexican town. Forceful, frenzied, violent, and uncompromising, Melchor’s depiction of a town ogling its own destruction is a powder keg that ignites on the first page and sustains its intense, explosive heat until its final sentence.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Mexican writer Melchor’s first book published in English is remarkable for the sheer force of its language. Melchor has deep reserves of talent and nerve. Engrossingly feverish.’

Kirkus

‘A linguistic blitzkrieg…There is a lot of talk about authenticity in fiction, and Melchor achieves it through her words. Hurricane Season is a dark celebration of language.’

NPR

‘Fernanda Melchor not only writes with the furious power that is required by the issues at hand, but on each page she shows that she has an eye and ear for it, as well as a sharpness rarely seen in our literature.’

Yuri Herrera

‘This is the Mexico of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, where the extremes of evil create a pummeling, hyper-realistic effect. But the 'elemental cry' of Ms. Melchor’s writing voice, a composite of anger and anguish, is entirely her own.’

Wall Street Journal