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 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**********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 más’ (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 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)"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

Told with the cinematic precision of a static road movie, like a Paris, Texas of South America. Almada has won awards in both Spain and Argentina and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish.Marketing PlansSocial media campaignGalleys availableCo-op availableAdvance reader copies (digital)National media campaign

After several weeks of touring around Entre Ríos – they had come down from the north along the Río Uruguay to Concordia, then taken Highway 18 right through the middle of the province to Paraná – the Reverend decided to go on to Chaco.They spent a couple of days in Paraná, the city where he had been born.Although he no longer had relatives or acquaintances there, having left when he was very young, he liked to go back every now and then.They stayed in a run-down hotel near the old bus terminal: a poky, depressing place with a view of the red-light district.Leni amused herself watching the weary comings and goings of the prostitutes and transvestites, who wore so little they barely had to undress when a client turned up.With his nose in his books and papers as usual, the Reverend was completely oblivious to their surroundings.Although he couldn’t bring himself to visit his grandparents’ house, where his mother had brought him into the world and raised him on her own (his father, an adventurer from the United States, had vanished before his birth, along with the in-laws’ meagre savings), he took Leni to see an old park on the banks of the river.They walked among ancient trees and saw the watermarks on their trunks, very high up on the ones near the bank; some still had flood wrack in their top branches. They ate their lunch on a stone table, and the Reverend said that as a child, he’d come to that park several times with his mother.‘It was very different then,’ he said, and bit into a sandwich. ‘On the weekends it was full of people. Not run down like this.’ As he ate, he looked nostalgically at the broken benches, the long grass and the rubbish left by visitors the previous weekend.When they finished their lunch, the Reverend wanted to go farther into the park; he said that there used to be two swimming pools and he was curious to see if they were still there. It didn’t take long to find them. Bits of iron were visible in the cracked cement around the edges; the tiles covering the inside walls were smeared with mud, and some were missing here and there, as if the old pools were losing their teeth. The floors were miniature swamps, breeding grounds for mosquitoes and toads, which hid among the plants growing in the slime.The Reverend sighed. The days were long gone when he and other children his age would bounce off the diving board into the water, planting their feet on the tiled floor and pushing back up to break the bright surface with their heads.He put his hands in his pockets and started walking slowly along the edge of one of the pools, head hanging and shoulders slumped. Leni watched her father’s bowed back and felt a bit sorry for him. She guessed that he was remembering happier times, the days of his childhood, the summer afternoons he’d spent there.But her sympathy didn’t last.At least he could go back to places full of memories. He could recognise a tree and reconstruct the day when he and his friends had climbed it right to the top.He could remember his mother spreading a chequered cloth over one of those ruined tables. But Leni had no lost paradise to revisit. Her childhood was very recent, but her memory of it was empty. Thanks to her father, the Reverend Pearson, and his holy mission, all she could remember was the inside of the same old car, crummy rooms in hundreds of indistinguishable hotels, the features of dozens of children she never spent long enough with to miss when the time came to move on, and a mother whose face she could hardly recall.The Reverend completed his circuit and came back to where his daughter was still standing, as rigid as Lot’s wife, as pitiless as the seven plagues.Leni saw his eyes glistening and quickly turned her back on him.‘Let’s go, Father.This place stinks.’