The Simple Art of Killing a Woman

Translated by Sophie Lewis

Longlisted for the Prix Fémina 2023: Best Foreign Novel

Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature

From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing.

To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension.

What she finds in the jungle is not only relentless oppression, but a deep longing for answers to an unsolved crime from her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of warrior women on a path of revenge and recovers the painful details of her mother’s death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a psychological trip with a twist. It’s about the strength of individuals in the face of overwhelming violence, the problem of femicide in Brazil, and the haunting of a cold case.

‘Femicide in Brazil is the bleak, urgent backdrop to Patrícia Melo’s assured, profuse novel The Simple Art of Killing a Woman (translated with equal verve by Sophie Lewis).’
— Catherine Taylor, The Irish Times

‘A rewarding exploration of the harsh realities faced by women, urging society towards urgent introspection.’
— The Star

‘A deeply affecting novel illuminating the costs of being a woman in a dangerous, misogynistic society.’
— Kirkus Reviews

‘Melo, an accomplished noir crime novelist and screenwriter, has truly found her subject in The Simple Art of Killing a Woman. Through the lens of gender-based violence she is able to examine the inequity and corruption that undergird and reinforce it in Brazil, the country with the fifth-highest rate of femicide in the world.’
— Alejandra Oliva, Americas Quarterly

‘The eco-thriller, the courtroom drama, the clinical accounts of death, and the fables from the forest crystallize into a form of hysterical, hallucinatory realism. . . . Melo has tried something radical here. She combines feverishly poetic language and the searching intelligence of the narrator with a near-endless accounting of horror. “When a woman dies,” Melo writes, “her story must be told and retold a thousand times.” Reading, I could not turn away.’
— Ariel Ramchandani, Southwest Review

‘Heavy, bold but beautifully powerful, Patrícia Melo’s latest is an enraging and necessary indictment of femicide in Brazil. Based on actual events, the novel is part thriller, part social commentary and it situates this violence among the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the healing potential of feminist collaborations.’
— Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

‘Melo’s thoughtful first-person narrative and starkly powerful verse interwoven with reports of murdered women fluidly bears the weight of a gripping crime story and fearless social commentary.’
— Christine Tran, Booklist

‘The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is an important book. . . . Even though the topic is gaining more attention, a lot of silence remains around the issue of femicide in Brazil. That silence can be dangerous for women. As such, the novel is a defiant work.’
— Allysson Casais, Full Stop

‘Melo’s newest book, The Simple Art of Killing a Woman, is a mixed-genre account of femicide in Brazil—and how this gender-based violence intersects with indigeneity, Blackness, and socio-racial legibility. […] [It] bears bountiful witness through its repetition, not of metaphor but political statement, fact, and serious proclamation.’
— Kaitlan Bui, Public Books

‘Patrícia Melo explodes the boundaries between two worlds with energy and colour. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vibrates with rage at femicide and glows with hallucinatory images of jaguars and Amazons.’
— Martina Läubli, NZZ – Bücher am Sonntag

‘The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is Patrícia Melo’s blackest novel to date and her best, a formal and stylistic high point in her work. The protagonist finds a way out of powerlessness into a self-determined life. ‘Literature’, says Melo, ‘is a space for resistance’, especially in dark times. It is again more necessary than ever.’
— Dagmar Kaindl, Buchkultur

‘The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is set in an oppressive but at the same time paradisiacal environment. Melo describes the Amazon rainforest as an intensely sensual place. Her novel is also a declaration of love for the world of the Amazonian natives.’
— Victoria Eglau, Deutschlandfunk, Köln

‘Brazil has a problem with femicides. It often takes years for a court case to be initiated and a few years longer if the victim was poor, black or indigenous. Melo makes the fates of real victims visible in her latest novel. Her determination to pursue a certain style, the freedom with which she writes confidently around generic set pieces, is evident at first glance in the variable structure of her chapters. Melo puts words into a singing rhythm, arranges them in verse so that they unfold as poems.’
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘Patrícia Melo’s novel is a powerful plea against male violence, not a diatribe but a brilliantly composed piece of literature.’
— Marcus Müntefering, Der Freitag

‘Engaging and well-written, the book is the first of the author with a female protagonist. In addressing a sad reality, Patrícia wanted to blend the plot with a little fable. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a work of fiction that brushes with real events.’
— Ana Clara Brant, Jornal Estado de Minas

‘This is the subject of Patrícia Melo’s great new book . . . Based on real events in Cruzeiro do Sul, the lawyer investigates cases and hears testimonies of the tragic stories of women who have been piled into oblivion and impunity . . . The most striking thing is the metamorphosis of the protagonist, rational and modern, in her experience with the old indigenous women and their ancestral myths and spells, in visions of breathtaking beauty.’
— Nelson Motta, O Globo

‘It is literature inspired by life. It is fiction constructed within the pages of a book illustrating the real events that weigh every day on the pages of newspapers and news websites. It is a woman crying out for all the others. An urgent novel that instigates and denounces.’
— Jornal do Brasil

‘With writing that is direct and at the same time strong and poetic, the author turns into literature the reality reported in newspaper headlines that are often hard to believe. From judicial and legislative issues to the first sign of violence that, out of fear, is silenced. The doubts, the feeling of guilt, the discoveries and, after so many male voices in her works, the profusion of different female characters.’
—Roberta Pinheiro, Correio Braziliense

‘This thriller is also, more than anything, a horrifying survey of femicide in Brazil. . . . A merciless indictment that includes litanies of victims’ names, their killers’ professions, and descriptions of brutal ill treatment, The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is as dark, tough, direct, and angry as its title. There’s no room for doubt.’
—Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir

‘Patrícia Melo has abandoned the thriller genre, in which she has excelled for more than twenty-five years, to create a book of many facets: mingling suspense, social fiction, and a drop of mystical poetry.’
—Nathalie Ricci, Nice-Matin

‘Patrícia Melo has written a social thriller that is dark, brutal and intoxicating. . . . Her brand of realism, by turns raw and magical, and her fierce activist drive, leavened with humour despite the seriousness of her subject, turns these shell-shocked ‘piles of women’ into a vertiginous whirlwind from which we emerge irreversibly sobered.’
—Julie Malaure, Le Point

‘In this powerful and very beautiful novel, Patrícia Melo faces the violence done to women head-on. . . . In this world suspended somewhere between dream and reality, Melo condemns the state-sanctioned massacre of Brazilian women, the fate especially reserved for indigenous people and, also, the destruction of Brazil’s forests. Her urgent and sensual style makes the novel unforgettable.’
—Aurélie Baudrier, Page des Libraires