When Women Kill 
Alia Trabucco Zeran 
(And Other Stories, £11.99)

Phenotypes
Paulo Scott
(And Other Stories, £10)

Only 5 per cent of murders throughout the world are committed by women. In Latin America, it is more common to report a dead woman than a woman who kills, making it one of the deadliest world regions for women to live. 

“Why write now about women who kill?” asks Alia Trabucco Zeran in her tantalising non-fiction book When Women Kill (And Other Stories, £11.99). The Chilean writer, author of the award-winning novel The Remainder, retells here the stories of four infamous Chilean women who committed the capital crime. 

In a fast-paced narrative that involves the author visiting the National Library of Chile and various archives to uncover information about these four cases, the lives and crimes of Corina Rojas, Rosa Faundez, Carolina Geel and Teresa Alfaro come alive in painstaking detail. 

We learn how Rojas, frustrated by her bourgeois married life in Santiago, sent her piano teacher lover to kill her husband as he was about to go to sleep, in what it became known as the murder on Calle Lord Cochrane. 

There’s the case of Rosa Faundez, a working-class woman who dismembered her husband and hid the body parts in different sections of the Chilean capital. “The most horrifying crime recorded in police reports in recent times,” read the headline of Las Ultimas Noticias newspaper, dated June 4, 1923. 

Trabucco Zeran also tells the story of the fiction writer and journalist Carolina Geel, who without any apparent motive shot her partner in the tearoom of Hotel Crillon, in the centre of Santiago, in 1955, and later wrote a damning novel while serving her sentence in prison. Finally, we learn of the case of Teresa Alfaro, a seemingly subservient maid, who poisoned the three children and the mother of her female boss by using strychnine in milk bottles and in her prepared meals. “The lady killer and the poisoned bottles” was one of the headlines at that time, a case etched in the memory of an entire generation. 

By recounting these harrowing stories, and interspersing them with her own diary of the investigations, Trabucco Zeran has successfully managed to create a fascinating book of crime and human psychology that deals with deep-rooted female oppression, daily pressures from a pervasive patriarchal society, as well as gender discrimination and misconceptions. 

As the author explains in her illuminating epilogue, female violence “challenges the norms defining womanhood itself,” it begs “a critical reevaluation of the invisible gender laws — the laws that equate feminity with weakness and submission, and that fuel inequality and violence every single day.” 

Sophie Hughes’s superb translation has rendered Trabucco Zeran’s Chilean prose into a clear, precise English. A must read.     

Phenotypes (And Other Stories, £10) by Brazilian author Paulo Scott is a complex and idiosyncratic novel that surprised me and excited me in equal measure. 

The story is told from the perspective of Federico, a white-passing mixed race Brazilian who moves from Brasilia to Porto Alegre where his black brother lives, to deal with a family crisis after a gun the brothers hid for a friend when they were young turns up with his niece at a student protest. 

Scott deals with prescient issues such as race relations, discrimination and state violence and bureaucracy in Brazil with nuance and without giving straightforward answers. 

Instead, his prose of very long sentences, stream of consciousness ideas and frequent flashbacks — masterfully translated by Daniel Hahn — offers a myriad of perspectives that enrich the reading, problematising race, racism and social disparities not only in Brazilian society, but elsewhere in Latin America.

“The official came up, opened the door without pausing to ask permission, stepped inside and gestured for me to join him. I stood in front of eight unfamiliar people waiting for me, those eight who made up the commission devised by the new government to find an adequate solution […] to the chaos that had resulted, suddenly, from implementing a policy of racial quotas for students in Brazil.” 

So begins this inventive novel that was long-listed for the International Booker Prize 2022, written by one of the most innovative Latin American novelists of his generation.