Description:
The most devastating, intimate work to date from one of Spain's most prominent authors
"There are no secrets in this family!" proclaims Damián, the father, triumphantly. A secular idealist obsessed with morality and order, he is blind to the cracks in his home's foundations, the oppression that pervades it, and the elaborate fictions his wife and four children devise to survive it. While he quotes Gandhi and expounds on the virtues of education, charity and thrift, the children retreat into humiliated compliance or seek freedom in the most dangerous of places.
Through a mosaic of interlinked tales, spanning decades, acclaimed Spanish author Sara Mesa turns her unflinching gaze to the family as institution: the ideologies that shape it, the silences that undermine it, and the authority you can never quite escape.
Review Quotes: "Sara Mesa's writing is mysterious and fascinating: her characters brush against the limits in environments of fierce false calm. Un Amor is one of her best novels - tense and beautiful like a crouching bird."--Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
"When I read Sara Mesa, I'm there in the Wild West, sifting through the sand. There is a restless enjoyment, an inhospitable beauty, in my sieve. And then something miraculous when gold appears before my eyes."--Eva Baltasar, author of Boulder
"One of the writers of my generation that I admire the most. Sara does not feed the fashionable conversation nor does she care about other people's opinions. Sara's only commitment is to her own, excellent, literature."--Manuel Astur, author of Of Saints and Miracles
"Sara Mesa sees the world through the lens of power, exploring how questions of strength and weakness shape human behavior."--Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement
"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