Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City.

Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world. But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions.

Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city’s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

‘Fascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave’ New Yorker

‘The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy’ Paris Review

A gem-choked puzzle of a book * New York Times *
The novel is dappled with recognizably Bolañan pleasures * Paris Review *
Irresistible. * Telegraph *
[A]n entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel. * Wall Street Journal *
Bolaño is the writer who opened a new vein for 21st Century literature... Vivacious and weird and madly alive again.
Roberto Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time
Roberto Bolaño continues to cast a spell
Roberto Bolaño’s books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidity

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.