The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patricia Melo

From best-selling Brazilian crime novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying novel that is by turns poetic, humorous, inspiring, and dark.

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.

The unnamed narrator, a young lawyer, has experienced more violence than the average person. To escape an overprotective grandmother and a newly aggressive lover, she 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 violence against women that has become so commonplace she needs a large notebook to record all the cases. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of warrior women who are bent on revenging the men who killed them—and gradually, she recovers the details of her mother’s death 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.

Patricia 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, and she was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and Time Magazine included her among the Fifty Latin American Leaders of the New Millenium. She lives in Switzerland.
Sophie Lewis translates from the French and Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Verne, Marcel Ayme, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Sheyla Smanioto, and Joao Gilberto Noll, among others. Her translation of Emilie de Turckheim's novel Heloise is Bald was commended for the 2016 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and her translation of Noemi 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. She lives in London.