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Paradais

by Fernanda Melchor

Desire and inequality behind the gates

Regular price $17.69 USD
Regular price $29.49 USD Sale price $17.69 USD
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AlbakiReads Editorial

Desire and inequality behind the gates

Set within a luxury housing complex, *Paradais* brings together two teenagers whose lives are shaped by sharply different forms of frustration: Franco’s fixation on a married neighbor and Polo’s wish to escape exhausting work and a narco-controlled village. Their fantasies and grievances converge in a scheme the description calls macabre. The gated community links private privilege to the wider social pressures named in the book’s framing, including racism, classism, and violence. The novel’s focus is not only on adolescent desire, but on how those desires take form amid unequal conditions and constrained choices.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in contemporary Mexican fiction and its social context.
  • Those drawn to stories about teenagers, desire, and the pressures of class and violence.
  • Readers interested in settings where privilege and hardship exist in close proximity.

Themes

Class inequalityRacismViolenceAdolescent desire and frustrationConstrained choices

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor--an attractive married woman and mother--while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.

Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society--with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies--and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

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