2666

2666 is Roberto Bolaño's sprawling final novel, published in Spanish in 2004, a year after his death. Structured in five parts, it opens with four European literary critics whose shared fascination with the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi leads them to Santa Teresa, a fictional stand-in for Ciudad Juárez. There the critics' quest gives way to the stories of a Chilean philosophy professor unraveling under the city's pressure, an American journalist pulled into reporting on the murders, a forensic catalog of the killings themselves and their chief suspect, and finally the wartime origins of Archimboldi. Widely regarded as one of the major novels of the 21st century, it won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.