Paradais

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor – an attractive married woman and mother – while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society – fractured by issues of race, class and violence – and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

‘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 Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

‘Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’
— Julian Lucas, New York Times

‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.’
— Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

‘A masterpiece of concision ... Paradais is a labyrinthine monologue on the banal violence of a modern-day teenager.’
— Virginie Despentes, author of Vernon Subutex

‘[Melchor’s] long, fevered sentences – which carry off daredevil moves, such as shifting tense and viewpoint from one clause to the next – combine with the emotional and physical violence of the story to produce a cacophonous effect. But time spent with her writing leaves no doubt: the unholy noise she creates is the work of someone who knows exactly which notes to hit.’
— Chris Power, Guardian

‘Fernanda Melchor’s method is not to produce shocks but to make violence as endemic in her writing ... Rhythm and lexis work in tandem to produce a savage lyricism. The translator Sophie Hughes marvellously matches the author in her pursuit of a new cadence.... an extraordinary feat of control, making [this] exceptional novel into a contemporary masterpiece.’
—Miranda France, TLS

‘Melchor uses shock to lay bare issues of classism, misogyny, and the ravages of child abuse. Her prose, ably translated by Hughes, is dizzying but effective; it’s as if she’s holding the reader’s head and daring them to look away from the social problems she brings to light. This might be a deeply disconcerting novel, but it’s also a brave one. A fever dream that's as hard to read as it is brilliant.’
— Kirkus

‘Paradais is a torrent of piss and shit and blood and semen, but for all its visceral realism it also possesses a mythic quality. It’s all here: Elysium, the gates of Hades, and an explorer-hero whose great moment results only in him finding himself back where he started.’
— Review 31

‘Melchor delivers us to her fool’s paradise with merciless precision, stripped of narrative luxuries like vengeance or confession, and instead debarking for a land where violence is simply a descriptive feature.’
— James Butler-Gruett, Cardiff Review

Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. In 2018, she won the PEN Mexico Award for Literary and Journalistic Excellence and in 2019 the German Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season.

Sophie Hughes translates Spanish and Latin American authors. She was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019 and 2020, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize.