Roberto Bolaño

Brought to you by Penguin. 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...

Brought to you by Penguin. Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his...

Brought to you by Penguin. New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through...

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...’ A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary...

Brought to you by Penguin. Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile’s young poetry scene. But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile’s leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the...

Brought to you by Penguin. Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing. A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world – but every door opens onto a...

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...’ A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the...

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk’... A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man...

Brought to you by Penguin. Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry. A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory...

Brought to you by Penguin. Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies in hospital, hiccupping himself to death. When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis, his wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud, the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. Pain, in love...

Brought to you by Penguin. Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí’s fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy – and revenge. Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old masion on the outskirts of...

Brought to you by Penguin. Mass-murdering authors. Writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring. A pilot who crafts his poetry in the sky. A tour de force of black humour and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of pan-American...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime' So begins Bianca’s tale of growing up the hard way. Orphaned overnight as a teenager, she drops out of school and drifts into the bad company of two criminals her brother brings home. As...