Published in 2020 (first published 2014)
97 pages
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 Rodolfo Walsh Award and of the 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).
What is this book about?
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.
