Hurricane Season

By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator

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

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.

“Chisme, Fury, and Fear Brought Stunningly to Life”

The audiobook performance of Hurricane Season is one of the most remarkable audiobook experiences I have ever had. Five stars without hesitation. The performances by Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabón, and Ana Osorio elevate an already extraordinary novel into something immersive and almost overwhelming in its intensity.

What makes this adaptation so effective is that the shifting narrators perfectly match Fernanda Melchor’s use of free indirect discourse and fractured perspectives. Each chapter inhabits a different consciousness, and the performers capture not only the gendered differences in voice, but the emotional texture, rhythm, paranoia, rage, fear, vulgarity, and desperation of each character. The audiobook makes you feel the asymmetry and instability of the novel even more powerfully because each voice arrives with its own energy and psychological atmosphere.

Inés del Castillo’s sections especially captured that breathless torrent of chisme, trauma, gossip, and emotional overload that defines the novel’s style. Tim Pabón brought a deeply unsettling emotional realism to the male perspectives, especially the simmering machismo, confusion, repression, and anger beneath the surface bravado. Ana Osorio was equally phenomenal at capturing the vulnerability, exhaustion, and emotional claustrophobia of the female voices.

What impressed me most was the pacing. The prose in this novel moves fast. Furious at times. The narrators understood that Melchor’s sentences are not meant to sound polished or overly theatrical. They sound like people unloading years of pain, shame, paranoia, resentment, and memory in one uninterrupted rush. The performances preserve the oral quality of the text beautifully. At times it genuinely felt less like listening to a novel and more like overhearing real people confessing, gossiping, accusing, and unraveling.

This is one of those rare audiobooks where the format does not merely complement the novel. It deepens it. The multiple voices make the structure clearer, the emotional shifts more visceral, and the social chaos more immersive. It pulled me even further into the world of the book and intensified everything that makes this novel unforgettable.

Talk about a hurricane

This book was everywhere— all over the place and yet it all flowed together like you’ve been hit with a hurricane. There’s so much going on that’s it’s overwhelming yet you can’t help but want more! Whew!

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.

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.