A masterpiece in its audacity . . . This novel defies summation: it is epic, tangential, nomadic, and yet a magisterial weave of differing literary genres. It is hard to believe that there will be a better book published this year (Sunday Telegraph)

It's blindingly obvious you are being seduced by one of the greatest and most distinctive voices in modern fiction . . . Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño (Sunday Times)

By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world's disasters, Bolaño has proved that it can do anything (Scotsman)

2666 held me from beginning to end - reminding me, above all, of The Man Without Qualities - and sent me back to read all Bolaño's other novels. You will want to experience this one (Spectator)

Wondrous . . . 2666 is a major literary event . . . It is an important development in the novel form and an unforgettable piece of writing that will resonate for years to come (Daily Telegraph)

2666 makes difficulty sexy. Or, rather, it successfully (and sexily) makes the case that art has every right to be challenging, shocking, self-referential, intellectual, intermittently insane, and to contain more corpses than a CSI box set. It is a novel that crackles with moral purpose (Prospect)

2666 has the power to mesmerise . . . All human life is contained in these burning pages, and Natasha Wimmer deserves a medal for her fluent translation (Independent on Sunday)

Bolaño's most audacious performance. 2666 offers some of the arcane allusiveness of Thomas Pynchon's work and the psychologically acute yet stylised noir of David Lynch. Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade are also touchstones. Yet ultimately the book's most significant forebear may be Moby-Dick, that symphonic masterpiece (Financial Times)

A vibrant, troubling, often deeply disturbing vision of life that persuades you of its truth, so that you feel you're not just inhabiting Bolaño's world but the world as it really is, even if you wished it to be otherwise. That's what makes him a major writer (Irish Independent)

2666 lingers in the unconscious like a sizzling psychotropic for days or weeks after reading. It is a novel both prodigious in scope and profound in implication, but a book ablaze with the furious passion of its own composition. As the Argentinian writer Rodrigo Fresán has observed, "What is sought and achieved here is the Total Novel, placing the author of 2666 on the same team as Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Proust, Musil and Pynchon." Like each of these titanic forebears, Bolaño has come close to re-imagining the novel (Independent)

The fact that the book remains as riveting as any top-notch thriller is testament to Bolaño's astonishing virtuosity . . . 2666 achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world (Sunday Times)

2666 is a book full of other books, and one powered by a sense of possibility and discovery . . . Goethe conceived "world literature" as a way of thinking about all books, whereas Bolaño, with his mixture of dynamism and overreach, managed to achieve it in a single novel (The Times)

2666 is a masterpiece or nothing. In the States, it has been widely acclaimed as the former, perhaps even "the first great book of the twenty-first century" And I think that's not without justification (Evening Standard)