Description

Author of International Booker Finalist Not a River

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 Maria Luisa Quevedo, raped, strangled, and dumped in wasteland; and twenty-year-old Sarita Mundin, 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.

Publisher Review

"Fate has in Dead Girls the perfume of a Greek tragedy: immutable, irreversible, lethal." --El Pais "Far from the detective story, this is an intimate tale, a certain negative of the autobiography of a young woman looking at other young women and how all of them are perceived by a society where misogyny and violence against them is still an everyday affair." --Pagina 12 "A tense, precise chronicle that treats seriously a still serious subject." --El Cultural, Spain "Selva Almada reinvents the imaginative rural world of a country. She is an author gifted with a very uncommon power and sensitivity." --Rolling Stone (Argentina)