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About the Book

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures 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 learns about the 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 an epidemic of femicide but also persistent racism, deforestation, and a deep longing for answers to her 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 is a lamentation for the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history and truth; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

Praise for THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN

“Women rise defiant against misogynistic forces in the truth-filled novel The Simple Art of Killing a Woman. While the dead cannot be resurrected, lives might be spared with knowledge—and via feminist alliances."

— Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

“Brazilian author Melo weaves together crime, magical realism, mythology, and social criticism in this relevant and urgent translation from the Portuguese by Lewis. Though the subject is horrifying, especially in the details about marred and dismembered victims, the narrator’s voice is captivating and compelling, offering strength and purpose rather than despair. A deeply affecting novel illuminating the costs of being a woman in a dangerous, misogynistic society.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“Melo, an accomplished noir crime novelist and screenwriter, has truly found her subject in The Simple Art of Killing a Woman. Through the lens of gender-based violence she is able to examine the inequity and corruption that undergird and reinforce it in Brazil, the country with the fifth-highest rate of femicide in the world.” 

— Alejandra Oliva, Americas Quarterly

“The eco-thriller, the courtroom drama, the clinical accounts of death, and the fables from the forest crystallize into a form of hysterical, hallucinatory realism. . . . Melo has tried something radical here. She combines feverishly poetic language and the searching intelligence of the narrator with a near-endless accounting of horror. “When a woman dies,” Melo writes, “her story must be told and retold a thousand times.” Reading, I could not turn away.

— Ariel Ramchandani, Southwest Review

“Heavy, bold but beautifully powerful, Patrícia Melo’s latest is an enraging and necessary indictment of femicide in Brazil. Based on actual events, the novel is part thriller, part social commentary and it situates this violence among the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the healing potential of feminist collaborations.”

— Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“Melo’s thoughtful first-person narrative and starkly powerful verse interwoven with reports of murdered women
fluidly bears the weight of a gripping crime story and fearless social commentary.”

— Christine Tran, Booklist

“The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is an important book. . . . Even though the topic is gaining more attention, a lot of silence remains around the issue of femicide in Brazil. That silence can be dangerous for women. As such, the novel is a defiant work.” 

— Alysson Casais, Full Stop

“Melo’s newest book, The Simple Art of Killing a Woman, is a mixed-genre account of femicide in Brazil—and how this gender-based violence intersects with indigeneity, Blackness, and socio-racial legibility. […] [It] bears bountiful witness through its repetition, not of metaphor but political statement, fact, and serious proclamation.”

— Kaitlan Bui, Public Books

“Patrícia Melo explodes the boundaries between two worlds with energy and color. [The Simple Art of Killing a Woman] vibrates with rage at femicide and glows with hallucinatory images of jaguars and Amazons.”

— Martina Läubli, New Journal of Zürich

“Melo’s blackest novel to date and her best, a formal and stylistic high point in her work. The protagonist finds a way out of powerlessness into a self-determined life. ‘Literature,’ says Melo, ‘is a space for resistance,’ especially in dark times. It is again more necessary than ever.”

— Dagmar Kaindl, Buchkultur

“Brazil has a problem with femicides. It often takes years for a court case to be initiated and a few years longer if the victim was poor, Black, or indigenous. Melo makes the fates of real victims visible in her latest novel. Her determination to pursue a certain style, the freedom with which she writes confidently around generic set pieces, is evident at first glance. . . . Melo puts words into a singing rhythm, arranges them in verse so that they unfold as poems.”

— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“Patrícia Melo’s novel is a powerful plea against male violence, not a diatribe but a brilliantly composed piece of literature.”

— Marcus Müntefering, Der Freitag

“Engaging and well-written, the book is the author’s first to have a female protagonist. In addressing a sad reality, Melo has chosen to blend the plot with a little fable. [The Simple Art of Killing a Woman] is a work of fiction that depicts real-life events.”

— Ana Clara Brant, Jornal Estado de Minas

“[Femicide] is the subject of Patrícia Melo’s excellent new book. . . . Based on real events in Cruzeiro do Sul, a lawyer investigates cases and hears testimonies of the tragic stories of women who have been relegated to oblivion. . . . Most striking is the metamorphosis of our rational, modern protagonist and her experience with indigenous women and their ancestral knowledge, in visions of breathtaking beauty.”

— Nelson Motta, O Globo

“This is literature inspired by life. This is fiction constructed within the pages of a book illustrating the real events that shout every day from the pages of newspapers and news websites. Here is one woman crying out for all women. An urgent novel that galvanizes and condemns.”

— Jornal do Brasil

“With writing that is direct and at the same time strong and poetic, the author turns into literature the reality reported in newspaper headlines that are often hard to believe. From judicial and legislative issues to the first sign of violence that is silenced out of fear. The doubts, the sense of guilt, the discoveries and, after so many male voices in her works, the profusion of different female characters.”

— Roberta Pinheiro, Correio Braziliense

“This thriller is also, more than anything, a horrifying survey of femicide in Brazil. . . . A merciless indictment that includes litanies of victims’ names, their killers’ professions, and descriptions of brutal ill treatment, The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is as dark, tough, direct, and angry as its title. There’s no room for doubt.”

— Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir

“Patrícia Melo has abandoned the thriller genre, in which she has excelled for more than twenty-five years, to create a book of many facets: mingling suspense, social fiction, and a drop of mystical poetry.”
— Nathalie Ricci, Nice-Matin

“Patrícia Melo has written a social thriller that is dark, brutal and intoxicating. . . . Her brand of realism, by turns raw and magical, and her fierce activist drive, leavened with humour despite the seriousness of her subject, turns these shell-shocked ‘piles of women’ into a vertiginous whirlwind from which we emerge irreversibly sobered.”

— Julie Malaure, Le Point

“In this powerful and very beautiful novel, Patrícia Melo faces the violence done to women head-on. . . . In this world suspended somewhere between dream and reality, Melo condemns the state-sanctioned massacre of Brazilian women, the fate especially reserved for indigenous people and, also, the destruction of Brazil’s forests. Her urgent and sensual style makes the novel unforgettable.”

— Aurélie Baudrier, Page des Libraires

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

BOOK DETAILS

Paperback ISBN: 9781632063465 • $17
Publication date: Dec 5, 2023
5.5" x 8.25" • 256 pages
Fiction: Crime / Latin America / Literary
Rights: North America