Where To Start With Gabriel García Márquez Books

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic, reserving his heart for Fermina. A beautifully packaged edition of one of García Márquez’s most beloved novels, with never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author’s son, Gonzalo García Barcha.

Find the Spanish-language edition here.

Late in his life, Gabriel García Márquez declared: “I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor for the Nobel Prize, but rather for the newspaper. I was born a journalist … It’s in my blood.” Now available for the first time in English, this selection offers a glimpse into the great novelist’s career as a reporter. The Scandal of the Century is a tribute to García Márquez’s dedication to the profession he believed to be “the best in the world.”

Find the Spanish-language edition here.

Written across a lifetime, this collection of speeches chart the growth of a genius: each is a snapshot offering insights into the beliefs and ideas of a world-renowned storyteller. Preserving García Márquez’s unmistakable voice for future generations, I’m Not Here to Give a Speech is a must-have for anyone who ever fell in love with Macondo or cherished a battered copy of Love in the Time of Cholera.

Set in the lush, coastal tropics of 18th century colonial Colombia, this is the story of Sierva Maria and the priest Cayetano Delaura, whose chaste love affair leads to their destruction. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, García Márquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. He also depicts the keening ache of Colombia after nearly forty years of rebel uprisings, right-wing death squads, currency collapse, and narco-democracy. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language and journalistic rigor, García Márquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.

On the eve of his 19th birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit — he has purchased hundreds of women — he asks a madam for her assistance. The 14-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.

In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact. In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.

Gabriel García Márquez’s most political novel is the tragic story of General Simón Bolívar, the man who tried to unite a continent. Regarded as one of the most revered heroes of the western hemisphere, in García Márquez’s brilliant reimagining, he is magnificently flawed as well. The General in His Labyrinth is an unforgettable portrait of a visionary as he wanders the labyrinth of his failing powers — and still-powerful memories.

Here is García Márquez’s shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. In this autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves, Living to Tell the Tale is a work of enchantment.

Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The gripping story of the murder of a young aristocrat that puts an entire society — not just a pair of murderers — on trial. The more that is learned, the less is understood, as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion.

In 1955, García Márquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogotá, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. 10 days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is García Márquez’s account of that sailor’s ordeal.

In 1973, the film director Miguel Littín fled Chile after the new dictator General Augusto Pinochet came to power and instituted a reign of terror. In 1985, Littín returned to pull off a very tricky stunt: He would secretly put together a film that would tell the truth about Pinochet’s benighted Chile — a film that would capture the world’s attention. García Márquez sat down with Littín to hear the story of his escapade, with all its scary, comic, and not-a-little surreal ups and downs. Clandestine in Chile is a true-life adventure story and a classic of modern reportage.

An intimate and lively collection of interviews with a giant of 20th century literature — the only collection of interviews with García Márquez available. A wide-ranging and revealing book, Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview is an essential book for lifelong fans — and readers who are encountering the master’s work for the first time.