On My Bookshelf by Isabel Allende... One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez is arguably the best Latin American novel ever written. I found characters that seemed to have escaped from my crazy family – the voice of my grandfather, the history of my continent, and much, much more.
'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.' Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendia and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquiades excites Aureliano Buendia's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands. Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendia household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds...
'No lover of fiction can fail to respond to the grace of Marquez's writing' Sunday Telegraph
'It's the most magical book I have ever read... I think [Marquez] has influenced the world' Caroline Herrera
'The book that sort of saved my life' Emma Thompson
'It's so much fun to read, unexpected and beautiful' Darryl Hannah
'The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years' Salman Rushdie
'Should be required reading for the entire human race' New York Times
Author
About Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928 in the town of Aracatca, Colombia. Latin America's preeminent man of letters, he is considered by many to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He began his writing career as a journalist and is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
