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.
