Probably not through the latest lost work to surface, “The Third Reich,” a moody and uneven novel about a German war-games champion published by FSG at the end of last year. If you’re a Bolaño neophyte, this must look intimidating. The job they did of sifting through his unpublished writings in the immediate aftermath of Bolaño’s death in 2003 can’t have been especially thorough, for every other week, it seems, they find themselves tripping over another stout stack of papers, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a new thousand-page opus on pornography, obscure minor poets, and the end of the world.

The spine remains undamaged.You have to question the detective skills, to say nothing of the clerical skills, of Roberto Bolaño’s literary executors. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. 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. 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 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. 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. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe - our own. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. This novel is an elegy for a generation' Independent New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City.

With a new afterword by Natasha Wimmer `Savagely comic yet equally tender.

The savage detectives book