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. Girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate.
As a sense of conspiracy grows and an apocalyptic shadow draws closer, the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century history reveals itself in a novel of an astonishing scale and burning intensity.
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER
'A landmark in what's possible for the novel. Bolaño has proven it can do anything' New York Times
'Wondrous... Unforgettable...will resonate for years to come' Daily Telegraph
'As riveting as any top-notch thriller... 2666 achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world' Sunday Times
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.
