As a new Netflix film adaptation of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted Hurricane Season is released, here’s our guide to the book, the author, her influences and accolades
- Shortlisted
- The International Booker Prize 2020
- Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
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Fernanda Melchor’s formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons, written with a brutal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling
Hurricane Season opens with the macabre discovery of a decomposing body on the outskirts a village in rural Mexico. The body is that of the local witch, feared by the men but relied upon by the women for love charms and illegal abortions. The book soon transcends its whodunnit constraints: the culprits are named early on in the story. The questions shifts from who to why, as Melchor paints a portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. A Netflix film adaptation was released on November 1 2023.
Fernanda Melchor
Fernanda Melchor has been nominated twice for the International Booker Prize – longlisted in 2022 and shortlisted in 2020
More about Fernanda Melchor 
Sophie Hughes
Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish and Italian, and is the most nominated translator in the International Booker Prize’s 10-year history
More about Sophie Hughes Other nominated books by Fernanda Melchor
Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society
Other nominated books by Sophie Hughes
A taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence – scathing and affecting in equal measure
Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society
A masterpiece of metafiction, Mac and His Problem is Enrique Vila-Matas’s testament to the power and playfulness of great literature
Intense, intelligent and extraordinarily sensitive, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of generational trauma
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