Description

A vast literary reckoning with disappearance, obsession and the violence threaded through modern history.

Set in Santa Teresa on the Mexico US border, this literary crime novel about missing women unfolds across intersecting lives: European academics in pursuit of a reclusive writer, a journalist drawn into the city’s unrest, and a community haunted by a growing list of unsolved murders.

What begins as an intellectual quest gradually reveals a deeper and more disturbing pattern. The killings of girls and women recur with numbing regularity, their investigation fragmented and inconclusive. Around them, careers advance, rivalries flare and history presses forward. The search for meaning becomes inseparable from the search for the dead.

Shifting between continents and decades, the novel resists easy answers. Its scope is immense, yet its power lies in accumulation: detail by detail, case by case, it exposes the quiet machinery that allows brutality to persist.

Publisher Review

A masterpiece * Time * Bolano's most audacious performance . . . It is bold in a way that few works really are * Financial Times * Bolano's masterwork . . . An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force * The New York Review of Books * Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolano. * Sunday Times * Roberto Bolano's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.