Paradais — Fernanda Melchor

Author of the acclaimed novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor leads us into a different kind of hell: paradise

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 grueling 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 -- with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies -- and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.