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
**********
Praise for Selva Almada
Almada combines reportage, fiction, and autobiography to explore femicide in Argentina in her acute, unflinching latest. -Publishers Weekly, 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**Part journalism, part history, part autobiography, part relentless nightmare.** -Shelf Awareness, starred review**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**An unassuming yet intensely felt narrative. (4 stars)** -The Arts Desk**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**Genre-defying, with beautifully crafted and reflective prose.** -The F Word**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**The literary quality of the text shines.** -Sound and Vision**The prose strikes a perfect tone - clinical and punchy when necessary, angry and lyrical, brutal yet humanistic.** -TN2**Exquisite prose that vibrates with a deep, melodious rage.** -The Monthly Booking**It's crisp, bracing, and beautiful.** -White Review**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 mas' (not one more).** -The Skinny**A tense, precise chronicle that treats seriously a still serious subject.** -El Cultural**A powerful read, shedding a stark light on the horrors of gender violence.** -The Big Issue**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**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**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**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**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**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)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**Gripping, shocking and sad.** -The Book Satchel**** Edinburgh 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 Pais**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 Pais**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.** -German 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 Nacion**
**********
