Hurricane Season

By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator

Narrated by: Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabon, Ana Osorio

Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence - real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.

©2016 Fernanda Melchor; English translation copyright 2020 Sophie Hughes (P)2020 Audible, Inc.

Great book!

A close look at our most vulnerable humanity: longing for love, acceptance, and strength. All this existing in an environment crude enough to make it shine.

Disturbing topics in a sparkling performance

Enjoy every piece of it: the surprising curves of the story, the approach, the audible acting.

Dark and powerful

This book is based on journalistic work. She is a trained journalist, but she fictionalized the stories. It's a very sad story about poverty, hatered of women and gay men, drug abuse, narcos, corrupt cops, torture, murder, prostitution... It's a story about what happens to people who are denied everything, materially and emotionally.

Excellent Story, Iffy Performances

Hard to listen to due to the often brutal content but still a brilliant story.
It can be distracting when spanish passages are read in broken or mangled spanish.
I'm unsure how difficult it is to find real spanish speaking performers but it must be tough.

Painfully Accurate

“Hurricane Season” is painfully accurate because its characters remind me of people I grew up with—coarse, crude, opportunistic exploiters. This book is as close as I would want to get to my fellow neighbors again. This is a well written but disturbing book.

Difficult to Rate

The Spanish names (characters) and Spanish words mixed into the story made the story difficult for me to follow. There was a witch, a murder and a lot of swears, sex and violence- that’s about all I am taking away from this book. However, the narration, and stream of concise style writing was enjoyable. The vulgarity was not an issue for me but it is excessive.

Powerful and devastating narrative

This amazing novel is not for the faint of heart. Reading it is like pushing on a bruise. It hurts to keep reading, but you feel compelled to nonetheless. The Audible version is excellent...bringing the narratives to life in an unforgettable way.

Brutal

This is a headphones-only, brutal, and original novel from an author I'll be keeping up with. You've been warned about the content, so please do not rate this novel poorly because of its subject matter.

Bleak and hopeless

Despite the author's talent, she has produced a disgusting and pointless novel. Shock value just stuns me. I was expecting way more, but I could certainly imagine wasting my time on something worse. Between deranged masochistic revenge porn and pure existential despair, there are some solid meditations on life to be found. Great effort on Audible's part to make this bearable.

Wow

One of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read and I loved it, haha. It goes without saying that this story took a toll on my soul; with all the foul language, murder, rape, and just plan awfulness of the characters in the entire story. I was hook threw every chapter though. The narrator’s where fantastic and the author is one to look out for in more books she will write. I give this book the rating I gave it because it’s just raw, brutal, and an all around good read.