Paradais

Reviews

"With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the books navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex… In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made." — Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New Yorker

"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

"Paradais is beautiful and terrible." — Marcus McGee, LARB

"Melchor’s prose is singular, with its fair share of page-long sentences that travel from the deepest psychic corners of her characters to the broadest panoramas of Mexican life." — Leland Cheuk, National Public Radio

"Melchor’s brilliant, sinewy, streetwise second novel turns on a couple of young men in a Mexican town whose lusts take a violent turn...Melchor’s telling is psychologically revealing, finding ever deeper reservoirs of rage and dread in its characters." — Mark Athitakis, The Los Angeles Times

"Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais is brutal poetry, distilled." — Literary Hub

"Paradais warns against considering any luxurious abode as “safe” when the mere existence of such enclaves intensifies the inequalities that will eventually lead to their own demise. " — CrimeReads