Dead Girls
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher 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 María Luisa Quevedo, raped, strangled, and dumped in wasteland; and twenty-year-old Sarita Mundín, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Almada (The Wind That Lays Waste) combines reportage, fiction, and autobiography to explore femicide in Argentina in her acute, unflinching latest. While imagining the lives of three young women whose murders in central Argentina nearly 30 years earlier in the 1980s remain unsolved Almada describes her memories of the decade as a child, when "violence was normalised" and she was taught that "if you were raped, it was always your fault." The primary case is 19-year-old Andrea Danne, who was stabbed in the heart while asleep in bed, and Almada reconstructs Andrea's last moments with care and depth ("Lost, dazed by the drumming of the rain and the wind that snapped the thinnest branches of the trees in the yard, hazy with sleep, utterly disoriented"). These passages of lyrical beauty are juxtaposed with graphic descriptions of mutilations, rape, and murder. Almada details her investigations but offers no conclusions, only a brutal knowledge of what happened to the women and a sense of who they were. This eye-opening chronicle makes canny use of fiction to highlight a persistent, underreported problem in Argentina.
