Paradais

"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 Vasquez - 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