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Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with author Fernanda Melchor and translator Sophie Hughes to discuss and celebrate the release of Paradais.

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 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 grueling 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—with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies—and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is “one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices” (The Guardian). Her novel Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a New York TimesNotable Book.

Sophie Hughes has translated writers such as Alia Trabucco Zerán, Laia Jufresa, and José Revueltas, among others. She has been shortlisted twice for the International Booker Prize, most recently in 2020 for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, and longlisted a third time for her co-translation, with Margaret Jull Costa, of Mac’s Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas.

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