Living to Tell the Tale spans Gabriel Garcia Marquez's life from his birth in Colombia in 1927, through his emerging career as a writer, up to the 1950s and his proposal to the woman who would become his wife. Insightful, daring and beguiling in equal measure, it charts how Garcia Marquez's astonishing early life influenced the man who, more than any other, has been hailed as the twentieth century's greatest and most-beloved writer.
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
'An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women' The Times
'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love ...'
Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza's impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half century, Florentino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.
When Fermina's husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?
'A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy' Newsweek
'A delight' Melvyn Bragg
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
'A velvety pleasure to read. Marquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humour, a love letter to the dying light' John Updike 'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin ...'
He has never married, never loved and never gone to bed with a woman he didn't pay. But on finding a young girl naked and asleep on the brothel owner's bed, a passion is ignited in his heart - and he feels, for the first time, the urgent pangs of love.
Each night, exhausted by her factory work, 'Delgadina' sleeps peacefully whilst he watches her quietly. During these solitary early hours, his love for her deepens and he finds himself reflecting on his newly found passion and the loveless life he had led. By day, his columns in the local newspaper are read avidly by those who recognize in his outpourings the enlivening and transformative power of love.
'Marquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller' Daily Mail
'There is not one stale sentence, redundant word, or unfinished thought' The Times
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
'A story only a writer of Marquez's stature could tell so brilliantly' Mail on Sunday
'She looked over her should before getting into the car to be sure no one was following her ...'
Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron; ruthless manipulator, brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Medellin cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts.
Terrified of the new Colombian President's determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages.
In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Marquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark and volatile months.
'Reads with an urgency which belongs to the finest fiction. I have never read anything which gave me a better sense of the way Colombia was in its worst times' Daily Telegraph
'A piece of remarkable investigative journalism made all the more brilliant by the author's talent for magical storytelling' Financial Times
'Compellingly readable' Sunday Times
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL
'An imaginative writer of genius, the topmost pinnacle of an entire generation of Latin American novelists of cathedral-like proportions' Guardian
In a decaying Colombian town the Colonel and his sick wife are living from day to day, scraping together funds for food and medicine. Each Friday the Colonel waits for a letter to come in the post, hoping for the pension he is owed that will change their lives. While he waits the Colonel puts his hopes in his rooster - a prize bird that will make him money when cockfighting comes into season. But until then the bird - like the Colonel and his ailing wife - must somehow be fed ...
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
'Superb and intensely readable' Time Out
'An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December ...'
When a witch doctor appears on the doorstep of the Marquis de Casalduero prophesizing a plague of rabies in their Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims - until, that is, he hears that his young daughter, Sierva Maria, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive.
Sierva Maria appears completely unscathed - but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition, it's not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town's woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcising the evil spirit recognizes the girl's sanity, but can he convince the town that it's not her that needs healing?
'Brilliantly moving. A tour de force' A.S. Byatt 'A compassionate, witty and unforgettable masterpiece' Daily Telegraph
'At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable' Sunday Times
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
'The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years. Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie '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...
'Should be required reading for the entire human race' New York Times
'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' Carolina Herrera
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
STRANGE PILGRIMS
'Filled with greedy joys, with small pleasures, polished like apples against a sleeve' Observer
'The first thing Senora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha ...'
Their distant, nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world ...
Marquez's strange pilgrims - the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scare
d for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a long-haul flight from Paris - experience with all his humour, warmth and colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.
'Celebratory and full of strange relish at life's oddness. The stories draw their strength from Marquez's generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent' William Boyd 'The most important writer of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton
'Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself' New Statesman
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
'It asks to be read more than twice, and the rewards are dazzling' Observer
'Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside ...'
As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man laying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their egocentric, maniacally violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?
Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Marquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.
'Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its total originality' Vogue
'Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator' Guardian
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
'The vigour and coherence of Marquez's vision, the brilliance and beauty of his imagery, the narrative tension ... coursing through his pages ... makes it difficult to put down' Daily Telegraph
At the age of forty-six General Simon Bolivar, who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolivar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all his life ...
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
'A gripping tale of survival' The Times
'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Colombia ...'
In 1955, eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Marquez retells the survivor's amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was Marquez's first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.
'The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic' Independent
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THE BEGINNING
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First published in Spain as La Mala Hora 1968
This translation first published in the United States of America by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1979
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1980
Published in Penguin Books 1996
This edition published 2014
Copyright (c) Editorial Sudamericana SA, 1968
This translation copyright (c) Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1979
All rights reserved
Cover (c) Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photos
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-91743-6
In Evil Hour Page 17
