Un amor

(Paperback)

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Description

Named the Book of the Year by Several Spanish Newspapers.

The story of Un amor takes place in La Escapa, a small rural town where Nat, a young and inexperienced translator, has just moved. Her landlord, who gives her a dog as a welcome gesture, will soon show his true colors, and the conflicts surrounding the rented houseits poor construction, full of cracks and leakswill become a true obsession for her. The rest of the inhabitants of the areathe girl from the store, Piter the hippie, the old and insane Roberta, Andreas the German, and the city family that spends there on weekendswill welcome Nat with apparent normality, while mutual incomprehension and strangeness beat in the background. La Escapa, with the mountain of El Glauco always present in the background, will end up acquiring its own personality, oppressive and confusing, which will confront Nat not only with her neighbors, but also with herself and her own failures. Full of silences and misunderstandings, of prejudices and misconceptions, of taboos and transgressions, Un amor addresses, implicitly but constantly, the issue of language not as a form of communication but of exclusion and difference. Sara Mesa once again confronts the reader with the limits of her own morality in an ambitious, risky and solid work in which, as if it were a Greek tragedy, the most unexpected impulses of its protagonists emerge little by little while, In parallel, the community builds its scapegoat.

Reviews

Praise for Sara Mesa:

"With short, propulsive chapters, Sara Mesa creates an unforgettable gothic landscape, centered on the mysterious and menacing Wybrany College, that twists in ways that unsettle and thrill. In Four by Four, Mesa's sentences are clear as glass, but when you look through you will be terrified by what you see."--Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

"The atmospheric unraveling of the mystery will keep you turning the page; the ending will leave you stunned--Mesa's Four by Four is a tautly written literary thriller that juxtaposes the innocence of children with the fetish of control; a social parable that warns against the silence of oppression and isolation through its disquieting, sparse prose."--Kelsey Westenberg, Seminary Co-op

"Stylistically, Four by Four's narrative structure is both dazzling and dizzying, as its perfect pacing only enhances the metastasizing dread and dis-ease. . . . Mesa exposes the thin veneer of venerability to be hiding something menacing and unforgivable--and Four by Four lays it bare for all the world to see."--Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books

"Very few authors evoke a visceral reaction with prose in the way that Sara Mesa does. . . . Four by Four sounds an alarm on the dangers of power, privilege, and the self-delusions told in order to hide complicity. A work of high gothic art, Four by Four solidifies Mesa as one of the strongest female voices in contemporary Spanish literature."--Cristina Rodriguez, Deep Vellum Books

Author Bio

Sara Mesa is the author of eight works of fiction, including Scar (winner of the Ojo Critico Prize), Four by Four (a finalist for the Herralde Prize), An Invisible Fire (winner of the Premio Mlaga de Novela), Among the Hedges, and Un amor, which was named by several Spanish newspapers as the book of the year for 2020. Her works have been translated into more than ten different languages, and she has been widely praised for her concise, sharp writing style.

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durn, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Jon Bilbao, Juan Gmez Brcena, Almudena Snchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adn. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno's In Case We Lose Power.