“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
“This is a linguistically precise, stylistically spare and emotionally devastating look at the corrosive effect of abuse and power imbalance, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson and Samanta Schweblin.”
—Cindy Pauldine, Shelf Awareness, starred review
“Bad Handwriting is an achievement of the short form: subdued, unpretentious, piercing, true.” —World Literature Today
“Like Bun∼uel’s Exterminating Angel, or even Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the rich are left rotting in a swamp of their own design.… Four by Four is an uncomfortably real look into the absurd world of the bourgeoisie. It is so complex and layered that, to reach a full understanding, one may have to read it two or even three times. Not a single character, after all, is what they seem.”
—Noelle McManus, The Women’s Review of Books
“… [I]n books like the successful Bad Handwriting, she is unafraid of letting the elements we sweep under the rug take center stage. Mesa urges her audience to meet the unlikeable head-on. In doing so, she allows us to see just where our reflections hide in the frightening world of reality.” —Benjamin Woodard, On the Seawall
“The power in Mesa’s work comes from the tension between the ease of her phrasing and the shock of its thought hitting your mind. If she added more, she’d limit our imagination. But the terse nature of her lines lets the idea slink from the page and burrow into our brain.”
—Brian Wood, author of Joytime Killbox
“Among the Hedges is a daring, sympathetic novel about a friendship between two people whom society would prefer to keep apart.”
—Foreword Review
“[Sara Mesa] deftly mixes immersive narration and relentless creepiness with incisive class commentary; by the novel’s end, I was appalled both for its characters and for my own world.”—Lily Meyer, NPR
“Four by Four is a masterclass in restraint and tension for both writers and translators.”—Book Riot
“Mesa has an almost magical ability to write long sentences that seem short. Her stories use bluntness to devastating effect, both when it comes to the prose itself and in the way she develops characters. Very few authors are willing or able to inhabit protagonists as loathsome as some of [hers].…” —Astra Magazine
“Stylistically, Four by Four’s narrative structure is both dazzling and dizzying, as its perfect pacing only enhances the metastasizing dread and disease.… 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
“Her keen eye for shifts in the balance of power is what makes [Among the Hedges] such an unsettling tour de force.”
—The Times Literary Supplement