Her wild pampas, her intimate wars, and with a delirious but contained imagination, sweet but cruel... Land of Smoke is my favourite book by one of my favourite Argentinian authors
Samanta Schweblin, author of <i>Fever Dream</i>
The forty-six stories and fragments in Land of Smoke... offer a gamut of lengths, themes and moods... the best are diamantine, intense and violent
Times Literary Supplement
Land of Smoke dazzles above all in its highly personal language, made up of simple words, long silences and constant poetic feats of daring, a language glowing with both the most absolute desperation and the fierce joy of discovering, capturing and sharing the glory of one's experiences
Leopoldo Brizuela
Surprising and enigmatic... reads like poetic communiqué from an exceptional imagination
LA Times
She writes with an air of authority (which Jessica Sequeira has translated from Spanish brilliantly) that begs your trust... Gallardo's succinct descriptions define the tangible - the weather, the landscape, the physical circumstances - while her plots are fantastical. The former grounds the latter, making anything seem possible
Chicago Review of Books
Gallardo's short story collection pushes the form in new and unexpected directions... This is a significant addition to South American literature in translation; the breadth of Gallardo's imagination expands the canon
Kirkus Reviews
At all turns, these stories are unsettling, surprising, and unmissable. Land of Smoke is a bountiful collection of short stories, full of sharp edges, odd magic, and unexpected allure
Foreword Reviews
Sara Gallardo's work possesses such radical originality it would be most appropriate to categorize it with the kind of literature that doesn't seem like anything else, that doesn't even fit the canon of the established heterodoxy, and that will always be read as a discovery
Martin Kohan
Someone who used different coloured glasses to everyone else
Mercedes Halfon
[Gallardo] shines as a compassionate storyteller
The National
Masterfully crafted short stories... Gallardo's success lies in the unusual twists and turns of her narratives... This collection should be ranked alongside other great works of fiction by Latin American female writers
Morning Star
[Land of Smoke] is a haunting cornucopia of the strangest fare Southern South America can possibly offer
Bookanista
A wonderful collection. It reads like a selection from a lifetime's work
1streading (blog)