Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles.
What follows is a brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. In vigorous, earthy language (Sophie Hughes’s resourceful translation raids US and British slang for what you guess must be a pretty creative repertoire of curses and epithets), we’re plunged into the chaotic lives of several villagers in the Witch’s orbit, including druggy layabout Luismi, seen leaving her home the morning her body was found his pal Brando, tormented by secret lust and his lover, Norma, a 13-year-old runaway carrying her stepfather’s baby.
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