The Skating Rink - Couverture souple

Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño Sunday Times

When Nuria Martí, the beautiful Spanish figure skater, is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn t tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene . . .

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink narrated in turn by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives.

Bolaño writes with such elegance, verve and style and is immensely readable Guardian

His fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental Times Literary Supplement

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His novel, The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times Book Review. His posthumous masterpiece, 2666, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.