"Almada combines reportage, fiction, and autobiography to explore femicide in Argentina in her acute, unflinching latest." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"An unassuming yet intensely felt narrative. (4 stars)" —The Arts Desk"Not an easy book, but it feels like an important one – a work of investigative writing about how easily women’s lives are obscured." —The Scotsman"Part journalism, part history, part autobiography, part relentless nightmare." —Shelf Awareness, starred review"Almada’s prose is sparse, but the details count. Her ear for dialogue and especially gossip is pitch perfect. Her eye for detail is hawkish." —LA Review of Books"A powerful read, shedding a stark light on the horrors of gender violence." —The Big Issue"A tense, precise chronicle that treats seriously a still serious subject." —El Cultural"You’ll walk away from this book with a vivid memory of where you were, how you were feeling, and what the weather was like on the day that you read Dead Girls." —Books and Bao"This is not a book that will make you feel at peace with the world, but that is precisely where its strength and persuasion lie." —Translating Women"The literary quality of the text shines." —Sound and Vision"This is a powerful read...[Almada's] effective use of fiction ensures a deep empathy in her readers which strict reportage sometimes fails to evoke." —The Big Issue"The prose strikes a perfect tone – clinical and punchy when necessary, angry and lyrical, brutal yet humanistic." —TN2"Challenge[s] the true crime obsession in an indirect way. " —Pendora Magazine"What makes the book compelling is how the author explores issues of domestic violence, state complicity, machismo and family negligence, along with class and social inequalities, in a non-sentimental prose which is all the more effective as result." —Morning Star"Genre-defying, with beautifully crafted and reflective prose." —The F Word"The devastating conclusion of the narrator is that the women who survive are unlikely to have made it unscathed but they are lucky ones – lucky to be alive." —NB Magazine"It is a profound novel and call to action still relevant as activists continue to take to the streets throughout Latin America to decry, ‘ni una más’ (not one more)." —The Skinny"It’s crisp, bracing, and beautiful." —White Review"Part coming-of-age, part detective work, partly a web of rumors, Almada’s story fuses a variety of genres to create a work that splits the seams of personal narrative, journalism, and fiction." —NACLA"Exquisite prose that vibrates with a deep, melodious rage." —The Monthly Booking"Recounted with a lyrical simplicity that is almost brutal." —The Oxonian Review"Painstakingly investigated ... imbued with personal connection" —The Oxonian Review"Fate has in Dead Girls the perfume of a Greek tragedy: immutable, irreversible, lethal." —El País"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"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)"Gripping, shocking and sad." —The Book Satchel"Dead Girls is a brutal, necessary story in which Almada describes the crimes, states the facts and lays bare the horror of these femicides." —Tony's Reading List**********Praise for Selva AlmadaEdinburgh International Book Festival First book Award (Winner)Book Cover of the Year (Saltire Awards) (Winner)"Like Flannery O’Connor and Juan Rulfo, Almada fills her taut, eerie novel with an understanding of rural life, loneliness, temptation and faith." —BBC Culture"Billed as a ‘promising voice’ in Latin American literature, this tale delivers readily on that promise." —Booklist"The drama of this refreshingly unpredictable debut . . . smolders like a lit fuse waiting to touch off its well-orchestrated events. . . . A stimulating, heady story." —Publishers Weekly"The story packs a punch in its portraits of a man who exalts heaven and another who protests." —Kirkus"A dynamic introduction to a major Latin American literary force." —Shelf Awareness, starred review"[The Wind That Lays Waste] delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension." —TANK Magazine"The Wind That Lays Waste is elegant and stark, a kind of emblem or vision fetched from the far edges of things, arrested and stripped to its essence, as beautiful as it is unnerving. "" —Paul Harding , author of TINKERS"The Wind That Lays Waste is a mesmerizing novel, at once strange and compelling."" —Bonnie Jo Campbell , author of MOTHERS, TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS"The quality and resolve of her prose produce a power of suggestion that is unique to Selva Almada." —El País"The best novel written in Argentina in the last few years? Don’t know, and don’t care, but you must read Selva Almada." —El País"Almada’s prose has a touch of the Faulkner of As I Lay Dying but passed through the filters of the dirty light of the cotton fields and the clean clothes worn by country people to Sunday mass."" —Germán Machado"A distinctive debut: atmospheric, tension-packed, and written in vivid, poetic language." —Books from Scotland"Perhaps most powerful in the book is Almada’s focus on detail―she skillfully renders the story of a day in brief chapters that reveal the thoughts and fleeting encounters of characters, who are largely living inside themselves." —Ploughshares"Almada’s nuanced approach leaves room to explore her characters’ pasts in some detail, but, crucially, these individuals . . . are not defined by their mistakes." —ZYZZYVA"What seems fantastical soon turns hyper-realistic, in a style that is reminiscent of Juan Rulfo or Sara Gallardo." —La Nación**********"A successful riff on a classic Shakespearean tale." —Publishers Weekly"Such is Almada’s command of shape and pace, and the clean-edged vigour of the style McDermott voices with such skill, that we take Brickmakers on its own uncompromising terms – as pulp, tragedy and epic all at once." —The Arts Desk"Almada is forceful in her depictions of sex, violence, and rage. I feel her prose in my body: a punch in the gut, the sharpness of glass. McDermott’s translation captures the bite of Almada’s sentences, which render both tenderness and violence with devastating clarity." —Chicago Review of Books"Almada's breathtaking multigenerational tragedy is a haunting, unforgettable examination of the lasting consequences of careless inhumanity." —Shelf Awareness, starred review"Best books of 2021" —The Financial Times"There is a tremendous carnality to Almada’s writing, vividly captured in McDermott’s translation" —LA Review of Books"A rich, confident and urgent read." —Lunate"Brickmakers is one of the best books I've read this year ... It’s a brilliant, sizzling, unmissable treat" —Translating Women**********"A virtuoso literary work. […] Flashbacks and side scenes deepen the story which curls and twines like a thrusting tropical vine through the past, roping in sisters, wives, old lovers, boyhood adventures, and jealousies."" —Annie Proulx , author of THE SHIPPING NEWS"Told with the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream, this astonishing, stark novel doesn’t turn away from the hypnotic and disturbing effects of violence. Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so—the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture."" —Manuel Muñoz , author of WHAT YOU SEE IN THE DARK"Selva Almada constructs a lyric of roughness, of few words, a lyric in which the strong, calloused hands of her characters hardly need to be described to make themselves felt. They touch you. "" —Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , author of THE ADVENTURES OF CHINA IRON"Whether we are on an island or not, water is displacement, and reading this novel gently carries us through characters and places. " —Agencia Paco Urondo"Selva Almada’s voice has made its own mark on contemporary Argentinean literature, to such an extent that situating her as a writer by referring to the Southern Gothic of authors such as Faulkner, O’Connor or McCullers are superfluous. With Not a River, she establishes her own way of looking at things in order to create literature. " —Pagina/12"Almada is not a folkloric writer, but even so, she knows how to capture the idiosyncrasy of a region. Her characters reveal, in their parsimony, a dense inner life, plagued by existential concerns. Perhaps silence and the voices of nature take the place of possible answers. " —La Nación"This is a narrative of great depth in which the settings (the river, fishing, the island) emerge from a very powerful poetic narration that keeps quiet more than it says aloud, that omits more than it recounts, a dreamlike voice marked by an infinite and familiar wound anchored in a dialectic between dreams and an indestructible future. " —El periódico"In some passages of the novel, Almada seems to whisper what she is recounting rather than saying it out loud: her asymptomatic, almost invisible writing, punctuates the breathing of the sentences to create brief, beautiful images. " —El Tiempo"It is worth asking ourselves whether, as has often been said, Selva Almada’s literature has reinvented the rural imaginary of a region of our country, or whether her task is rather to point out the contrasts and contradictions of the dominant culture, in order to indirectly confront it. " —Revista Otra Parte"Powerful and elegantly done." —Tony's Reading List************

A timely work of unsettling journalistic fiction that focuses on the apathy towards gender violence and femicide that exists in Argentina. Considered a precursor to the #NiUnaMenos movement that tackles gender violence in Latin America, in the vein of #MeToo.Almada received an Honor from the Argentine Senate in 2019 for her work to raise awareness of violence against children, adolescents and women.First Charco title to be published in US and UK simultaneously.TV Rights sold (Argentina)Marketing PlansSimultaneous US/UK launchSocial media campaignGalleys availableCo-op availableAdvance reader copies (print and digital)National media campaignTargeted bookseller mailingSimultaneous eBook launch

The morning of November 16th, 1986, was clear and cloudless in Villa Elisa, the town where I was born and raised, in the central eastern part of Entre Ríos province.It was a Sunday and my dad was grilling meat in the backyard. We still didn’t have a proper barbecue, but he made do with a metal sheet on the ground, the coals on top, and a grill on top of the coals. My dad would barbecue in all weathers: if it rained, he just used another piece of metal to cover the meat and the coals.Near the grill, in the branches of the mulberry tree, a portable, battery-powered radio, tuned permanently to LT26 Radio Nuevo Mundo.They played traditional folk songs and read the news every hour, though there was never much to read. It wasn’t yet forest fire season in the El Palmar national park, around thirty miles away, which went up in flames every summer and set off the sirens in all the fire stations nearby. Aside from the odd road accident, always some kid heading back from a dance, barely anything happened at weekends. Not even football in the afternoons, because the heat meant the tournament had moved to the evenings.I’d been woken that morning in the early hours by a gale that shook the roof of the house. I stretched out in bed and felt something that made me sit bolt upright, heart racing. The mattress was damp, and some warm, slimy forms moved against my legs. Still half-asleep, it took me a few seconds to work out what was going on: my cat had given birth at the foot of the bed again.The lightning that flashed through the window showed her curled up, gazing at me with her yellow eyes. I pulled myself into a ball, hugging my knees, so as not to touch them again.My sister was asleep in the next bed.The lightning cast a blue glow over her face, her half-open eyes – she always slept that way, like hares do – and her chest as it rose and fell, far removed from the storm and the rain that had swept everything away. I fell asleep too, looking at her.When I awoke,only my dad was up.My mum,brother and sister were still sleeping.The cat and her kittens had gone from the bed. The only trace of the birth was a yellowish stain with dark edges, at one end of the sheet.I went out to the yard and told my dad the cat had given birth but I couldn’t find her or her kittens. He was sitting in the shade of the mulberry tree, away from the grill but close enough to keep an eye on it.The stainless steel cup he always used was on the ground at his feet, filled with wine and ice.The metal was sweating.She must’ve hidden them in the shed, he said.I looked over, but couldn’t bring myself to check. A mad dog we used to have once buried her puppies in the shed. She ripped the head off one of them.The canopy of the mulberry tree was a green sky with the sun glinting golden through the leaves. In a few weeks it would be covered in fruit, flies would come buzzing around it, the air would be thick with the bitter- sweet smell of overripe mulberries, and no one would want to sit underneath it for a while. But that morning it was beautiful.You just had to watch out for the hairy caterpillars, bright and green like Christmas wreaths, which were sometimes so heavy they fell from the leaves and burned your skin with their acidic sparks.Then came the news on the radio. I hadn’t been paying attention, but I heard every single word.In the early hours of that same morning, in San José, a town twelve miles away, a teenager had been murdered in her bed as she slept.My dad and I remained silent.From where I stood, I watched him get up from his chair and arrange the coals with a metal rod, levelling them out, bashing them to break up the bigger lumps, his face beaded with sweat from the heat of the flames, the meat he’d just thrown on sizzling gently.A neighbour walked past and shouted something. My dad, still bent over the grill, looked round and waved with his free hand. Be right there, he yelled. And he began nudging the coals aside with the same rod, moving them to one end of the metal, closest to where the ñandubay wood was burning, and leaving just a few, which he figured would be enough to keep the grill hot until he came back. Be right there meant swinging by the bar on the corner for a few cold ones. He slid on the flip-flops that had disappeared in the grass, pulling on the shirt he’d hung from a branch of the mulberry tree.If you see it going out, shove a few coals back over. I won’t be long, he said, hurrying into the street with his sandals flapping, like a kid who’s just seen the ice-cream van.I sat in his chair and picked up the cup he’d left behind.The metal was freezing. An ice cube was floating in the dregs of the wine. I fished it out with two fingers and put it in my mouth to suck.At first it tasted faintly of alcohol, but then it was just water.When there was only a small piece left, I crunched it between my teeth. I laid one hand on my thigh, below the hem of my shorts. It was a shock to feel it so cold. Like the hand of a corpse, I thought. Not that I’d ever touched one.I was thirteen, and that morning the news about the dead girl hit me like a revelation.My house,any teenager’s house, wasn’t really the safest place in the world. You could be killed inside your own home. Horror could live with you, under your roof.In the days that followed, I learnt more details. The girl’s name was Andrea Danne, she was nineteen, blonde, pretty, with blue eyes, she had a boyfriend and was training to be a psychology teacher. Someone had stabbed her in the heart.