2666 (Picador Classic, 45) - Tapa blanda

A masterpiece in its audacity . . . This novel defies summation: it is epic, tangential, nomadic, and yet a magisterial weave of differing literary genres. It is hard to believe that there will be a better book published this year * Sunday Telegraph * It's blindingly obvious you are being seduced by one of the greatest and most distinctive voices in modern fiction . . . Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolano * Sunday Times * By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world's disasters, Bolano has proved that it can do anything * Scotsman * 2666 held me from beginning to end - reminding me, above all, of The Man Without Qualities - and sent me back to read all Bolano's other novels. You will want to experience this one * Spectator * Wondrous . . . 2666 is a major literary event . . . It is an important development in the novel form and an unforgettable piece of writing that will resonate for years to come * Daily Telegraph * 2666 makes difficulty sexy. Or, rather, it successfully (and sexily) makes the case that art has every right to be challenging, shocking, self-referential, intellectual, intermittently insane, and to contain more corpses than a CSI box set. It is a novel that crackles with moral purpose * Prospect * 2666 has the power to mesmerise . . . All human life is contained in these burning pages, and Natasha Wimmer deserves a medal for her fluent translation * Independent on Sunday * Bolano's most audacious performance. 2666 offers some of the arcane allusiveness of Thomas Pynchon's work and the psychologically acute yet stylised noir of David Lynch. Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade are also touchstones. Yet ultimately the book's most significant forebear may be Moby-Dick, that symphonic masterpiece * Financial Times * A vibrant, troubling, often deeply disturbing vision of life that persuades you of its truth, so that you feel you're not just inhabiting Bolano's world but the world as it really is, even if you wished it to be otherwise. That's what makes him a major writer * Irish Independent * 2666 lingers in the unconscious like a sizzling psychotropic for days or weeks after reading. It is a novel both prodigious in scope and profound in implication, but a book ablaze with the furious passion of its own composition. As the Argentinian writer Rodrigo Fresan has observed, "What is sought and achieved here is the Total Novel, placing the author of 2666 on the same team as Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Proust, Musil and Pynchon." Like each of these titanic forebears, Bolano has come close to re-imagining the novel * Independent * The fact that the book remains as riveting as any top-notch thriller is testament to Bolano's astonishing virtuosity . . . 2666 achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world * Sunday Times * 2666 is a book full of other books, and one powered by a sense of possibility and discovery . . . Goethe conceived "world literature" as a way of thinking about all books, whereas Bolano, with his mixture of dynamism and overreach, managed to achieve it in a single novel * The Times * 2666 is a masterpiece or nothing. In the States, it has been widely acclaimed as the former, perhaps even "the first great book of the twenty-first century" And I think that's not without justification * Evening Standard *

With an introduction by Ben Lerner The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl, a vortex for lost souls. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But there is a darker side to the town: girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate and it is fast becoming the scene of a series of horrifying crimes. As 2666 progresses, the sense of conspiracy grows, and the shadow of the apocalypse is drawing closer. Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, 2666 became a sensation on publication and has been hailed across the world as Bolano's masterpiece. Terrifying, awe-inspiring and beautiful, it is the classic novel that has come to define one of Latin America's greatest writers.