Bolaño, Roberto: The Skating Rink

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.

The story revolves around the beautiful figure skating champion Nuria Martí. When she 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 town. What he doesn't tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds; but such a betrayal is only the beginning and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene . . .

Told in short suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators - a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered, yet still romantic, itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur - The Skating Rink is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.

'This short exquisite novel . . . manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing.' New York Times

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

'His fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental' Times Literary Supplement

'Bolaño has come close to re-imagining the novel' Independent

'His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction' Sunday Times

'Bolaño has proved [literature] can do anything' Scotsman

'[Bolaño] made each book more ambitious so that it will take us many years to come to terms with his vast achievement' Colm Tóibín

'He has the natural storyteller's gift - but more important, he has the power to lend an extraordinary glamour to the activities of making love and making poetry' Edmund White

'Bolaño was one of those rare writers who write for a future time, and we, especially we in the Anglophone world, have only begun to appreciate his strange, oblique genius' John Banville

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

'It's no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius' Washington Post

'Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of vision on the world' Guardian