Auxilio Lacouture is trapped.

For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry.

A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novella, Amulet is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists ‘choked by the brilliance of youth’, Auxilio’s passionate narration – both heartbreaking and lyrical – is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño’s art.

TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS

'Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history' The Times

‘Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become’ New Statesman

Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become. * New Statesman *
A curtain-raising taster to the epic of his landmark works. * Independent *
His work is the crossroads where Márquez meets Burroughs and Borges meets Mailer, resulting in a riotous dust-up. * Guardian *
Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history . . . spare but beautifully compacted. * The Times *
A short, original, engaged and engaging novel; a good introduction to the longer works of this writer. * Times Literary Supplement *

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.