The Skating Rink - Hardcover

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 Marti. 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 `Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is immensely readable' Guardian `His fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental' Times Literary Supplement `Bolano 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 `Bolano has proved [literature] can do anything' Scotsman `[Bolano] made each book more ambitious so that it will take us many years to come to terms with his vast achievement' Colm Toibin `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 `Bolano 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 Bolano' Sunday Times `It's no exaggeration to call Bolano a genius' Washington Post `Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of vision on the world' Guardian

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666. Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He is now teaching at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating books by Roberto Bolano and Cesar Aira for New Directions, he has published a critical study (Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge, Rodopi, 1999) and a collection of poems (Cut Lunch, Indigo, 2002).