2666 - Roberto Bolao

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. 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. As in the real town of Jurez, on which Santa Teresa is based, girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate . . .

As 2666 progresses, as the sense of conspiracy grows, as the shadow of the apocalypse draws closer, Santa Teresa becomes an emblem of the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century European history.

Written on an astonishing scale, and - in the last years of Roberto Bolao's life - with burning, visionary commitment, 2666 has been greeted across Europe and Latin America as the writer's masterpiece, surpassing even his previous work in imagination, beauty, and scope.

'One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time' El Pas

'Bolao's masterwork. An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel's narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery)' New York Review of Books

'Not just the great Spanish-language novel of this decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature. 2666 is a magisterial and inimitable' La Vanguardia

'Endlessly in love with people and books, Bolao's last novel ranges over the world and history' Le Monde des Livres

'A work of genius: the work of a master whose voice has all the authority and seeming effortlessness that we associate with the great classics of the ages' Blanco y Negro

'Bolao makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian