In her fascinating fast-paced novel that explores the effects of misogynist violence on a country, a community, a family - and on individual women themselves - Mexican writer, Fernanda Melchor, in Hurricane Season, offers an atypical take on the narco-thriller. Playing with the ubiquitous genre and subverting it in fascinating ways that show us the effects of this state and the glorification of criminals on the women who are left to bear the brunt of societies in collapse. Much larger than one city or one country, Hurricane Season shows us the particular ways that women are ostracized for stepping outside their expected roles and what happens when women take control - or attempt to - of their own lives in places where choices are limited and violence is always a threat on the periphery. Hurricane Season is a novelistic Rorschach test that each reader brings to the experience and interprets in different ways, with a multiplicity of voices and a fictional form that conjures the way chatter and gossip get underneath the skin of those under attack.

Fernanda Melchor talks with Parul Pandya about Hurricane Season and both the genre of the fairly tale, as well as the Faulknerian traditions of the Gothic Old South that she calls upon in creating this unforgettable world.

About this event's guests
Fernanda Melchor
Parul Pandya

Fernanda Melchor: Murder by Witchcraft