New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Bolao and Ulises Lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their mission: to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonoran Desert (and into obscurity) decades before. But the detectives are themselves hunted men, and their search for the past will end in violence, flight, and permanent exile. In this dazzling novel, the book that established Roberto Bolao's international reputation, he tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes - the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself - on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own.