My Documents by Alejandro Zambra

Archived in the 'My Documents' folder on award-winning Chilean author Alejandro Zambra's desktop are eleven stories that together form a cartography of contemporary solitude. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this novel in fragments evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. Written with the author's trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy, My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.