A Little Lumpen Novelita

A Little Lumpen Novelita

Summary

'Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime'

So begins Bianca’s tale of growing up the hard way. Orphaned overnight as a teenager, she drops out of school and drifts into the bad company of two criminals her brother brings home. As the four of them plot a fantastical crime, Bianca learns she can drift even lower...

Electric and tense with foreboding, A Little Lumpen Novelita - one of the last novellas Roberto Bolaño published – delivers a fractured fairy tale of taking control of one's fate.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

Bolaño has proven that literature can do everything’ The New York Times

‘The man was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time’ Paul Auster

Reviews

  • One of the best books of the year–A Little Lumpen Novelita feels as substantial as a book three times as long. This is a glittering gem, as maddening and haunting as you'd expect from Bolano.
    Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

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