Written in the last years of Roberto Bolano`s life, "2666" was greeted across Europe and Latin America as the great writer`s masterpiece, surpassing even his previous work in imagination, beauty, and scope. At the centre of the book is the fictional city of Santa Teresa on the Mexico-US border. It is an urban sprawl that draws in lost souls like a vortex: convicts and academics, an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, `missing` writer. But there is a darker side in the real town of Juarez, on which Santa Teresa is based, girls and women are disappearing at an alarming creeping sense of conspirac-y permeates "2666", from the apocalyptic overtones of its title, to the ways in which Santa Teresa becomes an emblem of the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth century European history. This is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate, visionary writer, one who unerringly `adjusts your angle of view on the world`. `A tour de force - though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel`s narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery` - "New York Review of Books".