2666

Hardcover, 898 pages

Published: 2004

Edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013)

National Book Critics Circle Award Fiction (2008)

Greatest Books (amalgamated list of best books)

Translated from the Spanish by: Natasha Wimmer (2008)

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

The  posthumous masterwork from “One of the greatest and most influential modern writers” (James Wood, the New York Times book review)