Hurricane Season
SynopsisPlot
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. 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―inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable―forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Story
About this book
In a small rural settlement called La Matosa, children find a body floating in the murky water of an irrigation canal. The dead woman is known locally as the Witch, a role she inherited from her mother, and one that made her both feared and respected. Suspicion soon falls on young men from the village, seen days earlier leaving her house, apparently carrying a lifeless body.
The novel unfolds through several narrators, none of them reliable, each adding details to the events around the death. Melchor writes in long unbroken streams of language that carry the reader through overlapping accounts of poverty, desire, and power. The village she describes is shaped by neglect and isolation, where violence and dark sexuality sit close to ordinary daily life.
Rather than keeping her characters at a distance, Melchor stays close enough to find traces of recognizable feeling in people many would dismiss. Hurricane Season was written in Spanish and later published in English, the first of Melchor's books to appear in that language. She had previously published the novel Falsa liebre.
