2666

Essential. Apocalyptic. Unique.

The novel that paved the way for 21st-century narrative.

The Mexican city of Santa Teresa—an alter ego for Ciudad Juárez—attracts the protagonists like a magnet. Four European literary critics travel to Sonora in the footsteps of the disappeared writer Benno von Archimboldi, whose life is recounted in the final part of the novel. There they will meet Amalfitano, the Chilean university professor who, along with his daughter, settles in the city, where the American journalist Oscar Fate will also arrive to broadcast a boxing match. But the heart of the story lies in “The Part About the Crimes” where, with surgical precision, Bolaño narrates the murders of women committed in Santa Teresa and the police’s fruitless investigations. In the epicenter of Evil, nothing can stop the horror.

With overwhelming force, in 2666, Bolaño creates a masterful work that breaks with all known literary trends and paves the way for 21st-century narrative. Violence and history intertwine with recurring themes in the author’s work: literature, the search, and the chronicle of reality.

2666 was awarded the Ciudad de Barcelona, Salambó, National Critics Circle Award, and Altazor prizes, rated as one of the best books of 2008 by The New York Times, chosen by 81 critics and writers from Spain and Latin America as one of the best books in Spanish of the last 25 years, and considered the best book in Spanish of the last twenty-five years by Babelia.

Reviews:
«The most admirable story of the last quarter century. Perhaps it is also of the immediately preceding one and it is very possible that it will be of the next one.»
José-Carlos Mainer, Babelia

«I like everything about Roberto Bolaño, his great, immense novels, but also his short stories.»
Pedro Almodóvar

«A work of overwhelming power and complexity. A final plea worthy of a master.»
The Boston Globe

«A mega-detective novel with strong indications of apocalyptic omens [with] memorable characters whose stories, always caught between laughter and horror, span two continents and include, among many other things, a dizzying journey through 20th-century European history, through the ruins of a culture in which literature continues to be a life raft. With life slipping through his fingers, by writing 2666, Bolaño saved the world with his words.»
Rosa Martí, Esquire

«Bolaño’s most audacious creation. It is brave in a way that few works are: it suddenly eliminates the gap between the amusing and the solemn.»
Henry Hitchings, Financial Times

«2666: the consecration of contemporary horror. Literature in its purest state.»
Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente

«His most important work and one of the greatest in contemporary literature in Spanish.»
J.A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia

«2666 is the total novel, without beginning or end, the place of all vertigos and all paradoxes, [...] where present and past, hope and despair merge and where truth and falsehood come so close that they become confused.»
Le Magazine Littéraire

«Narcos, corruption, machismo and brutal descriptions of events are the foundations of this sordid and masterful novel.»
Ana Trasobares, Esquire

«A work of posthumous monumentality.»
Darío Villanueva