Four by Four

Press & Reviews

‘Sara Mesa’s writing is mysterious and fascinating: her characters brush against the limits in environments of fierce false calm.’ – Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

‘Sara Mesa sees the world through the lens of power, exploring how questions of strength and weakness shape human behaviour...Her writing has an unnerving force: with a single sentence, she can reveal the darkness at the heart of a situation like a lens sliding silently, suddenly into focus.’ – Annie McDermott, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Sara Mesa’s deft control and economy of language shouldn’t come as a surprise. She’s a poet. Her nouns are razored. Her verbs are explosive … If you haven’t read her, you should. She won’t waste your time.’ – European Literary Review

‘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

‘A complex critique of love, lust, power, and human society.’ – World Literature Today

‘A meticulously constructed and chilling study of desire and influence.’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘[An] intriguingly ambiguous tale of autonomy and power.’ – Marie Claire, Best New Books of 2024

‘Mesa’s work is tense, intimate, and unsettling … we can’t look away.’ – Literary Hub

‘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

‘The fascination of Mesa's writing is in the closeness of her attention – she attends to all the complex weather of human feeling, allows her characters to go where they will – where, it feels to the reader, they inexorably must, despite the surprise and strangeness of their circumstances. Un Amor is a romance that reads like a thriller, a small-town intrigue that is consuming and essential. Such is the quiet intensity of La Escapa and the novel that inhabits it, the world beyond begins to blur – could almost disappear.’ – Martha Sprackland, author of Citadel and Milk Tooth