Amulet

Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become.A short, original, engaged and engaging novel; a good introduction to the longer works of this writer.Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history . . . spare but beautifully compacted.His work is the crossroads where Márquez meets Burroughs and Borges meets Mailer, resulting in a riotous dust-up.A curtain-raising taster to the epic of his landmark works.Latin American poetry and revolutionary thoughts are narrated by the 'Mother of Mexican poetry' in Roberto Bolaño's Amulet.

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of the university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry.

A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novel, Amulet is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists ‘choked by the brilliance of youth’, Auxilio’s passionate narration – both heart-breaking and lyrical – is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño’s art.

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.