Un Amor: A Novel

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 house—its poor construction, full of cracks and leaks—will become a true obsession for her. The rest of the inhabitants of the area—the girl from the store, Piter the hippie, the old and insane Roberta, Andreas the German, and the city family that spends there on weekends—will 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.