Gabriel Márquez

In his younger days, Simón Bolívar swept the Spanish back to Europe, liberating South America with his youthful vitality. Lonely, embittered and sickly, his power has dwindled and The Liberator enters the exile of retirement. Bolívar's journey is hindered by his own reluctance to relinquish his power. Despite the assassination attempts, jeering and humiliation he encounters, his fear of fading into the shadows keeps him clinging to the man he used to be...The General in His Labyrinth is re-issued on Gabriel García Márquez 's birthday to celebrate the publication of his books as ebooks for the first time.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a compelling, moving story exploring injustice and mob hysteria by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. 'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.' Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen - including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why...

Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez blends the natural with supernatural in Of Love and Other Demons - a novel which explores community, superstition and collective hysteria. 'An ash-grey dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst on to the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December.' When a witch doctor appears on the Marquis de Casalduero's doorstep prophesising a plague of rabies in the Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims - until 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 exorcizing the evil spirit recognises the girl's sanity, but can he convince the town that it's not her that needs healing?

Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, portrays a food company violating a small Colombia town in his vivid and powerful novel Leaf Storm. 'Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursed by the leaf storm.' Drenched by rain, the town has been decaying ever since the banana company left. Its people are sullen and bitter, so when the doctor - a foreigner who ended up the most hated man in town - dies, there is no one to mourn him. But also living in the town is the Colonel, who is bound to honour a promise made many years ago. The Colonel and his family must bury the doctor, despite the inclination of their fellow inhabitants that his corpse be forgotten and left to rot.

Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, tells a powerful tale of poverty and undying hope in his moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel. 'The Colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one spoonful left.' Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive. But on Fridays the postman comes - and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the Colonel's ageing heart. For fifteen years he's watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he'll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season. But until then the bird - like the Colonel and his wife - must somehow be fed...

Innocent Erendira and Other Stories is a collection of short stories from the Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 'Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow.' While her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Erendira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that's he collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table - and is fast asleep when it topples over...Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Erendira must repay for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Erendira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?

In Living to Tell the Tale Gabriel Garcia Marquez - winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude - recounts his personal experience of returning to the house in which he grew up and the memories that this visit conjured. 'My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house'. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was twenty-three, a young man experimenting with his writing when this mother asked him to come back with her to the village of his grandparents and the memories of his Colombian childhood. In the first part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, the Nobel Prize-winning author returns to the atmosphere and influences that shaped his formidable imagination and formed the basis of his world-famous, and much-loved, fiction.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping is a powerful retelling of actual events from a turbulent period of Colombian history. 'She looked over her shoulder 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 Madellin 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 an volatile months.

Collected Stories brings together many of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's spellbinding short stories, each brimming with a blend of the surreal, the magical, and the everyday that Nobel-Prize-winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude Marquez is known for. Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerizing tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a every old angel with enormous wings, stranded in a young couple's back garden; a town plagued by dying birds that fall from the sky and an awestruck village captivated by a beautiful drowned sailor. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Marquez's stories are a delight. "These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Marquez". (Guardian). "Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel Garcia Marquez". (Sunday Telegraph). "It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what "fabulous" really means". (Time Out). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include Autumn of the Patriarch, Bon Voyage Mr. President, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in his Labyrinth, In the Evil Hour, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, Leaf Storm, Living to Tell the Tale, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of Melancholy Whores, News of a Kidnapping, No-one Writes to the Colonel, Of Love and Other Demons, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and Strange Pilgrims.

Nobel prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells a tale of an unrequited love that outlasts all rivals in his masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera. '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, Flornetino 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?

One of the world's most famous novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, blends the natural with the supernatural in on one of the most magical reading experiences on earth. '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.' Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great masterpiece is the story of seven generations of the Buendia 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 its miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book, and only Aureliano Buendia can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy and comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, explores the loneliness of power in Autumn of the Patriarch. '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 lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their arrogant, manically 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.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, started his literary career with the publication of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor...'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia.' 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 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.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a powerful novel about a man who so far has never felt love from Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the One Hundred Years of Solitude. 'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.' On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a newspaper columnist in Colombia decides to give himself 'a night of mad love with a virgin adolescent'. But on seeing this beautiful girl he falls deeply under her spell. His love for his 'Delgadina' causes him to recall all the women he has paid to perform acts of love. And so the columnist realises he must chronicle the life of his heart, to offer it freely to the world...