The book’s title is a phonetic rendering of the same: “Paradais, Urquiza corrected Polo the second time he tried to say that gringo shit.

This tension is there in the inability of the main character, Polo, to pronounce the English name of the gated community where he works as a gardener: “Paradise”, rather than the Spanish “Paraíso”. If Hurricane Season depicted those with almost nothing killing each other for scraps, Paradais is about the faultline between the 1% and those who service their needs. Marinated in misogyny and violence, this is a Mexico where getting what you want means ripping it from someone else’s hands

Melchor’s determination to show rather than judge, even amid mounting horror, preserves her characters’ humanity. Again we are in a Mexico where people feel getting what they want means ripping it from someone else’s hands where young men aspire to join the narcos not because they are evil or homicidal, but because it’s the only route out. Its sentences are less breathless and serpentine, but its subject matter is equally challenging: murder, torture, rape, incest, domestic abuse and numerous forms of exploitation. Paradais, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, has a tighter focus than Hurricane Season (both are superbly translated into English by Sophie Hughes). 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.

Her 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. In her extraordinary 2020 novel Hurricane Season, her first to appear in English, she relates the story of a rural murder from multiple viewpoints. It lies more than 1,000 miles north of Veracruz, the Mexican state where Fernanda Melchor was born, but her books are marinated in precisely the same misogyny and violence. Santa Teresa, and the murders 2666 relentlessly itemises, have their real-world counterparts in Ciudad Juárez, which stands on the border between Mexico and the US. Practically all these crimes will go unsolved.

The scene’s grim power arises from its setting: Santa Teresa, a city suffering a decade-long torrent of femicides. M idway through Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, a gang of policemen sit in a coffee shop trading misogynistic jokes.

Hurricane season fernanda melchor