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One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Summary

Equally tragic, joyful and comical, Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a seamless blend of fantasy and reality, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa in Penguin Modern Classics.

Gabriel García Márquez's great masterpiece is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of several novels, including Leaf Storm (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

If you enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude, you might like Love in the Time of Cholera, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'With a single bound Gabriel García Márquez leaps on the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov ... dazzling'
The New York Times

Reviews

  • Getting lost and succumbing to the mastery of Gabriel García Márquez's storytelling is all part of the joy of this epic tale ... This incredible novel put me under a spell
    Dua Lipa

About the author

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a short-story writer, novelist, journalist and a screenwriter from Colombia. He was a reporter for a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, and also a foreign correspondent stationed in New York, Rome, Paris and Barcelona. Marquez is the author of numerous popular novels and short stories. He is well known for his unique literary style known as magical realism, in which he describes reality through magical events and elements. His most popular novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
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