Dead Girls

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. Agent: Claudia Bernaldo de Quirós, Agencia Literaria CBQ. (Sept.)