By Fernanda Melchor (trans. Sophie Hughes)
Published 23/3/22
Ant says... 'Paradais is another rip-roaring rollercoaster from Fernanda Melchor. In Paradais, Melchor sets a different scene from the dark folkloric forests of her first novel Hurricane Season. The reader finds themselves poolside in wealthy housing complex among the swamps of Mexico. Franco is a frustrated and violent teenager who is obsessed with a beautiful mother next door. In a bid to fulfil his lust, Franco lures a sidekick in Polo, the estate's young handyman whose financial frustrations have driven him to his own despair. In a desperate attempt to take control of their lives, the two hatch a final plot to escape the existence they have grown up in. Paradais is a novel about entrapment, class, the obsessions of youth and the dangerous desire to be wanted. A must read!'
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.
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'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, 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