The Simple Art of Killing A Woman

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she learns about the attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only an epidemic of femicide but also persistent racism, deforestation, and a deep longing for answers to her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance—and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a lamentation for the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history and truth; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.