Antwerp is Bolano intensified and distilled. As his friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, once suggested, it can be viewed as the Big Bang of his fictional universe. It is the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. It's a short book, with short chapters, each like a prose poem, and from this springboard which Bolano chose not to publish until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it he plunged into the unexplored depths of the modern novel for which he is now revered. In fifty-six sections, the fractured narration moves in multiple directions spliced together with an experimental crime novel set on the Costa Brava are voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from 'Roberto Bolano'. This is a deep and meditative work in Bolano's words, 'radical and solitary' the result of a highly personal wrestling with the form of the novel itself. The author sets out to ensure, wilfully, that this is a novel like no other for 'rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels' and the aim is nothing less than to find in the written word a powerful and sustaining life force: 'Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength'.

Antwerp

Roberto Bolano,Roberto Bolao

Pan Macmillan/ Picador

This is a spellbinding, sui generis, detective fiction focusing on the swirling vortex of sex, death, and intrigue surrounding a beautiful Spanish figure skating champion. Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion,''The Skating Rink'' is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona. The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of town. What he doesn't tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds; but such a betrayal is only the beginning and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene...Told in short suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators - a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered, yet still romantic, itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur - "The Skating Rink" is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.

Skating Rink

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

<p>Discovered after his death, in 2003, Bolano left this novel complete as a typewritten manuscript - meticulously corrected by hand - it is published in English translation for the first time. Udo Berger, aspiring writer and wargames champion of Stuttgart, decides it is time to take his new love, Ingeborg, on holiday to the Costa Brava. He brings along his new game, The Third Reich, which he plans to practice for the upcoming wargames tournament in Paris, where he will finally meet the sleek American champion, Rex Douglas. However, things take a sinister turn when some shady locals arrive on the scene and one of Udo's friends disappears. Pursued by a shadowy detective who visits his nightmares in quest for the truth; the surrealistic landscape of the Costa Brava and his increasingly feverish dreams draw him further into delirium. Finally, he finds himself locked in mortal combat when he engages in a game of Third Reich with the enigmatic and disfigured El Quemado - a foreigner w</p>

Third Reich

Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

Politics & Social Sciences

WILL STORR

Anthropology

Debatable Land

History

Robb, Graham

Europe

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