Additional information
by Patrícia Melo (Author), Sophie Lewis (Translator)
From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression--by turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.
To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region's women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance--and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother's early death.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.
Author Biography
Patrícia Melo was born in 1962 and is a highly regarded novelist, playwright and scriptwriter. She has been awarded a number of internationally renowned prizes, including the Jabuti Prize 2001, the German LiBeraturpreis 2013 and the German Crime Award 1998 and 2014; she was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Time Magazine included her among the Fifty Latin American Leaders of the New Millenium.
Sophie Lewis translates from the French and Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Sheyla Smanioto, and João Gilberto Noll, among others. Her translation of Emilie de Turckheim's novel Héloïse is Bald was commended for the 2016 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and her translation of Noémi Lefebvre's Blue Self-Portrait was shortlisted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize. In 2016 she launched Shadow Heroes, which designs and delivers workshops on translation for students at GCSE and above.
