Overview

Author of International Booker Finalist Not a River Internationally acclaimed author of Not a River , Selva Almada tackles the issue of gender violence in this hybrid work that follows in the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood or John Hersey's Hiroshima .Evoking with intimate first-hand knowledge the heat and dust of provincial Argentina, with all its secrets and conflicting loyalties, Almada tells the stories of three young women murdered in the early 1980s, as the country was celebrating its return to democracy. Three deaths that were never brought to justice and occurred long before the term 'femicide' became widely known: nineteen-year-old Andrea Danne, stabbed in her own bed; fifteen-year-old María Luisa Quevedo, raped, strangled, and dumped in wasteland; and twenty-year-old Sarita Mundín, whose disfigured body washed up on a river bank. In this brutal yet deeply important book, Selva Almada weaves these and other cases of violence against women into a clear-eyed, multi-faceted portrait that has global resonance.This is not a police chronicle, although there is an investigation. This is not a thriller, although there is mystery and suspense. Hard-hitting and lyrical, Almada blazes a new trail in journalistic fiction.

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9781916277847

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Reviews

Fate has in Dead Girls the perfume of a Greek tragedy: immutable, irreversible, lethal. --El Pais Far from the detective story, this is an intimate tale, a certain negative of the autobiography of a young woman looking at other young women and how all of them are perceived by a society where misogyny and violence against them is still an everyday affair. --Pagina 12 A tense, precise chronicle that treats seriously a still serious subject. --El Cultural, Spain Selva Almada reinvents the imaginative rural world of a country. She is an author gifted with a very uncommon power and sensitivity. --Rolling Stone (Argentina)

Almada combines reportage, fiction, and autobiography to explore femicide in Argentina in her acute, unflinching latest. --Publishers Weekly, starred review Almada's prose is sparse, but the details count. Her ear for dialogue and especially gossip is pitch perfect. Her eye for detail is hawkish. --LA Review of Books Part journalism, part history, part autobiography, part relentless nightmare. --Shelf Awareness, starred review Not an easy book, but it feels like an important one - a work of investigative writing about how easily women's lives are obscured. --The Scotsman An unassuming yet intensely felt narrative. (4 stars) --The Arts Desk This is a powerful read...[Almada's] effective use of fiction ensures a deep empathy in her readers which strict reportage sometimes fails to evoke. --The Big Issue Genre-defying, with beautifully crafted and reflective prose. --The F Word You'll walk away from this book with a vivid memory of where you were, how you were feeling, and what the weather was like on the day that you read Dead Girls. --Books and Bao The literary quality of the text shines. --Sound and Vision The prose strikes a perfect tone - clinical and punchy when necessary, angry and lyrical, brutal yet humanistic. --TN2 Exquisite prose that vibrates with a deep, melodious rage. --The Monthly Booking It is a profound novel and call to action still relevant as activists continue to take to the streets throughout Latin America to decry, 'ni una mas' (not one more). --The Skinny A tense, precise chronicle that treats seriously a still serious subject. --El Cultural A powerful read, shedding a stark light on the horrors of gender violence. --The Big Issue This is not a book that will make you feel at peace with the world, but that is precisely where its strength and persuasion lie. --Translating Women Challenge[s] the true crime obsession in an indirect way. --Pendora Magazine What makes the book compelling is how the author explores issues of domestic violence, state complicity, machismo and family negligence, along with class and social inequalities, in a non-sentimental prose which is all the more effective as result. --Morning Star Part coming-of-age, part detective work, partly a web of rumors, Almada's story fuses a variety of genres to create a work that splits the seams of personal narrative, journalism, and fiction. --NACLA The devastating conclusion of the narrator is that the women who survive are unlikely to have made it unscathed but they are lucky ones - lucky to be alive. --NB Magazine Fate has in Dead Girls the perfume of a Greek tragedy: immutable, irreversible, lethal. --El Pais Far from the detective story, this is an intimate tale, a certain negative of the autobiography of a young woman looking at other young women and how all of them are perceived by a society where misogyny and violence against them is still an everyday affair. --Pagina/12 Selva Almada reinvents the imaginative rural world of a country. She is an author gifted with a very uncommon power and sensitivity. --Rolling Stone (Argentina) Gripping, shocking and sad. --The Book Satchel Praise for Selva Almada Edinburgh International Book Festival First book Award (Winner) Book Cover of the Year (Saltire Awards) (Winner) Like Flannery O'Connor and Juan Rulfo, Almada fills her taut, eerie novel with an understanding of rural life, loneliness, temptation and faith. --BBC Culture Billed as a 'promising voice' in Latin American literature, this tale delivers readily on that promise. --Booklist The drama of this refreshingly unpredictable debut . . . smolders like a lit fuse waiting to touch off its well-orchestrated events. . . . A stimulating, heady story. --Publishers Weekly The story packs a punch in its portraits of a man who exalts heaven and another who protests. --Kirkus A dynamic introduction to a major Latin American literary force. --Shelf Awareness, starred review [The Wind That Lays Waste] delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension. --TANK Magazine The Wind That Lays Waste is elegant and stark, a kind of emblem or vision fetched from the far edges of things, arrested and stripped to its essence, as beautiful as it is unnerving. --Paul Harding, author of TINKERS The Wind That Lays Waste is a mesmerizing novel, at once strange and compelling. --Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of MOTHERS, TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS The quality and resolve of her prose produce a power of suggestion that is unique to Selva Almada. --El Pais The best novel written in Argentina in the last few years? Don't know, and don't care, but you must read Selva Almada. --El Pais Almada's prose has a touch of the Faulkner of As I Lay Dying but passed through the filters of the dirty light of the cotton fields and the clean clothes worn by country people to Sunday mass. --German Machado A distinctive debut: atmospheric, tension-packed, and written in vivid, poetic language. --Books from Scotland Perhaps most powerful in the book is Almada's focus on detail she skillfully renders the story of a day in brief chapters that reveal the thoughts and fleeting encounters of characters, who are largely living inside themselves. --Ploughshares Almada's nuanced approach leaves room to explore her characters' pasts in some detail, but, crucially, these individuals . . . are not defined by their mistakes. --ZYZZYVA What seems fantastical soon turns hyper-realistic, in a style that is reminiscent of Juan Rulfo or Sara Gallardo. --La Nacion

Author Information

Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1973) is considered one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals in the region. She has published several novels, a book of short stories, a book of journalistic fiction and a film diary (written on the set of Lucrecia Martel’s film Zama ). She has been finalist for the Medifé Prize, the Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels, the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of Tigre Juan Award. Her debut in English was The Wind that Lays Waste (Winner of the EIBF First Book Award 2019), followed by Dead Girls (2020), Brickmakers (2021), and Not a River (winner of the IILA Prize in Italy). Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.

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