Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing. A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world – but every door opens onto a nightmare. An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolano’s first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at ‘the big bang’ of Bolano’s enterprise into prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.