Paradais

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

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.

'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