New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala.

Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe. Told, shared and mythologised by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, their testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of all time.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

‘Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia. He could be funny, he could be literate, he could be devastating. And his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

‘Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world’ Guardian

This novel is an elegy for a generation. * Independent *
The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful. * Times Literary Supplement *
It’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality. * Washington Post *
My favorite writer . . . The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come. -- Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel. * Elle *
Roberto Bolaño's masterwork * Vogue *
The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.
For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close.
An exemplary literary rebel * New York Review of Books *

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.