It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico: hundreds of young people will soon die.

When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on campus. Staring at the floor, she recounts her bohemian life among the young poets of Mexico City-inventing and reinventing freely-and along the way she creates a cosmology of literature.

As they grow ever more hallucinatory, her memories become mythologies before completely transforming into riveting dark prophecies. Hair-raising and enthralling, Amulet is a heart-breaking novel and another brilliant example of the art of Roberto Bolano, 'the most admired novelist,' as Susan Sontag noted, 'in the Spanish-speaking world.'