Patricia Melo

Sophie Lewis (translator)

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is about the problem of femicide in Brazil and it's also about the power of women in the face of overwhelming male violence, the power of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the power of the jungle to save us all.

Even before she begins compiling a list of women killed by their lovers, partners, and husbands in Brazil, the unnamed narrator of The Simple Art of Killing a Woman, a young lawyer, has experienced more violence than she remembers.

To escape from a newly aggressive boyfriend, she accepts an assignment in the Amazon. In the border town of Cruzeiro do Sul, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman. Through Carla, she learns about the violence that has become so commonplace in the jungle that women often beg to end the trials themselves, and from both of them she comes to know the state of Acre, the last place to be incorporated into Brazilian territory. There, she sees not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but the depth of her own longing: for the palpable taste of the wild, for answers to her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she is joined by a chorus of warrior women bent on revenging the men who killed them--and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother's death by her father when she was very young.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a novel that resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems to the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil, and it is a modern, exacting, sometimes humorous and fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

Translated from the Portuguese by Sophie Lewis

The Simple Art of Killing Women

Atightly plotted crime novel of drug dealing gone wrong, police corruption, and macabre blackmail, by Brazil s best-selling mystery writer."

The Body Snatcher

Neste romance, um rotineiro problema entre um pacato professor e seu novo vizinho acaba se transformando numa guerra bárbara. A autora narra uma trama ambientada num Brasil violento e desigual, onde a vida perdeu seu valor fundamental e o homicídio passou a ser uma forma de resolver problemas corriqueiros.

Gog Magog

A black comedy on a writer of crime novels and a lady zoologist, specializing in snakes, who combine their respective expertise to murder her husband. By a Brazilian writer, author of The Killer.

In Praise of Lies

Praise for The Body Snatcher: "An excellent and atypical book, a fantastic adventure."—The Huffington Post "An explosive mixture of dread, greed and corruption. You won't put it down until you've read the very last page."—Cosmopolitan This tightly plotted novel by Brazil's best-selling crime author is a tale of drug dealing gone wrong, police corruption, and macabre blackmail, set in a heat-soaked town in the vast untamed Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday, alone on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack and pockets it along with the pilot's expensive watch. Thus begins the protagonist's long slide into corruption. When police locate the crash site, the pilot's body is missing and a large-scale search ensues. Our hero, now involved in a busted cocaine deal, ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. When the family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son, our hero, who does not have the pilot's body, decides someone else's will do. . . . Or so he thinks. Patricia Melo is an author and playwright born in Sao Paolo (1962). Her novels Lost World, The Killer, In Praise of Lies, and Inferno have been published in English to rave reviews. Her works have also been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Dutch.

Maiquel is a young used car salesman from the mean streets of Sao Paolo with a bleak outlook. When a petty barroom tiff turns sour, Maiquel gets his first taste of the kill. But instead of being arrested, he is lauded as a local hero. Yet something in the undertow troubles him.

A Psychological Thriller

The Killer

Luiz Ruffato

Nei Lopes

Cesar Cardoso

Joao Gilberto Noll

Domingos Pellegrini

Sergio Sant'Anna

Marcelo Moutinho

Joao Ximenes Braga

Elvira Vigna

Katie Slade

It’s the city the rest of the world descends on to party…. whether for the spectacular annual Carnival, the sun-kissed beaches, the World Cup, or, in 2016, the Olympics. It’s also a place that’s sadly become synonymous with some of the excesses of partying, the dark underbelly that accompanies any urban hedonist’s destination. But these are just two images of Rio. There are countless others: opulent seat of two former empires; stronghold of brutal, twentieth-century dictatorships; sprawling metropolis stretched between stunning mountain tops and equally stunningeconomic extremes – from the affluence of neighbourhoods like Leblon and Ipanema, to the overcrowded slums in the foothills, the favelas. This anthology brings together ten short stories that go beyond the postcards and snapshots, and introduce us to real residents of Rio – the cariocas: young hopefuls training to be the next stars of samba, exhausted labourers press-ganged into meeting an impossible construction deadline (the nation’s pride being at stake), bored call-girls, nostalgic drag queens, married couples having petty middle-class domestics…. These are characters who’ve developed a deep understanding of Rio’s contradictions, a way of living with the grey areas – between the grime and the glitz – that make Rio the ‘marvellous city’ it is.

Patricia Melo

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