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 Juarez, 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 Bolano'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 Pais

`Bolano'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, Bolano'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

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