With a new afterword by Natasha Wimmer

`Savagely comic yet equally tender . . . This novel is an elegy for a generation' Independent

New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet.

Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe - our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century.

`The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful' Times Literary Supplement

`A portrait of people for whom literature is bread and water, sex and death. The abiding message to be taken from Bolano's novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter' GQ

`It's no exaggeration to call Bolano a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality' Washington Post

`Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian