Description

‘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 the four of them plot a fantastical crime, Bianca learns she can drift even lower…

Electric and tense with foreboding, A Little Lumpen Novelita – one of the last novellas Roberto Bolano published – delivers a fractured fairy tale of taking control of one’s fate.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

‘Bolano has proven that literature can do everything’ The New York Times

‘The man was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time’ Paul Auster

Publisher Review

One of the best books of the year-A Little Lumpen Novelita feels as substantial as a book three times as long. This is a glittering gem, as maddening and haunting as you'd expect from Bolano. * Publishers Weekly, (starred review) * Electrifying. * Time * As for Bolano, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus. -- Junot Diaz Bolano has proven that literature can do everything. * The New York Times * Bolano has joined the immortals. * The Washington Post * The very highest level of literary achievement. -- Colm Tobin Roberto Bolano was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results were multi-dimensional. * The New York Review of Books * Gritty, compelling, profound. * The Philadelphia Inquirer *