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

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

"Savagely comic yet equally tender . . . 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

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

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

"It’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality." - Washington Post