"Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister."-- Sarah Perry, the Guardian "Barba is intensely alive to the shifting, even Janus-faced nature of strong feeling."-- San Francisco Chronicle " Such Small Hands is a magnificently chilling antidote to society's reverence for ideas of infantile innocence and purity."-- Financial Times "Barba's stunning and beautiful prose helps us realize that our adult incomprehension is not absolute."-- Los Angeles Review of Books "Each one of these pages is exquisite, and the end result is a perfectly expressed work that transmits the perverse and bizarre experience that is youth, where games signify life and death and where relationships are teased and pushed to the breaking point."-- Music & Literature "A lyrically rich and devastating portrayal of adolescent struggle."-- ZYZZYVA "A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong."&mdas; Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "Barba explores what the dynamics of an orphanage reveal about any insular community and the trials of its inevitable outcast.
"-- Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear "Andrés Barba needs no advice. He has already created a world that is perfectly realized and has a craft that is inappropriate for a writer of his age."-- Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature "In my opinion, Barba has become an essential writer."-- Rafael Chirbes, author of On the Edge "Andrés Barba is one of several impressive writers from Spain at work on fiction that brilliantly dissects the business of being alive."-- Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times "An unsettling, tightly controlled book."-- Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books (San Francisco) " Such Small Hands is a stick of dynamite. Nothing like having your world rearranged in two sittings."-- Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston) "I don't think I've ever read such a massively tiny book.
A poignant and truly gratifying novel."-- Nick Buzanski, Book Culture (New York) "In stunning prose, Andrés Barba probes the fissures that words stitch together long enough to form a scar. Love, hate, trauma--they're tightly coiled in Such Small Hands into that most universal of scars, childhood, and the results, also like childhood, are unsettling."-- Brad Johnson, Diesel, A Bookstore (Oakland) "Andrés Barba's magnificent novel will haunt you, and continue to haunt you when you least expect it."-- Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store (Seattle).