Amulet

Amulet

Summary

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped.

For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her 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 novella, 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 heartbreaking and lyrical – is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño’s art.

TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS

'Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history' The Times

‘Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become’ New Statesman

Reviews

  • Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become.
    New Statesman

About the author

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more