Love in the Time of Cholera (55 page)
Read Love in the Time of Cholera Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,Edith Grossman
‘A story only a writer of Márquez’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 Medellín 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 Márquez 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
‘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 …
‘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 María, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive.
Sierva María 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
‘The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years. Márquez 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 Buendía 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 José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía’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 Buendía 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 Márquez’s writing’
Sunday Telegraph
‘It’s the most magical book I have ever read. I think Márquez has influenced the world’ Carolina Herrera