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
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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