One Hundred Years of Solitude
Series: essential.penguin S.
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Category: Fiction / G - I
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication date: 3 September 1998
Number of pages: 432
Prizes:
Runner-up for The BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.
Shortlisted for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.
Description:
This magical realist novel tells the history of the Buendias family, the founders of Macondo, a remote South American settlement. In the world of the novel there is a Spanish galleon beached in the jungle, a flying carpet, and an iguana in a woman's womb.
Review:
As a Nobel Prize for Literature winner (1982), Gabriel Garcia Marquez has already been acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of this century. The hugely influential One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel with magnificent scope and panoramic perspective, formed by his much lauded 'magic realism' style. The town of Macondo and its fatalistic inhabitants are weaved into a story which is simultaneously complex and simple. From the moment when the gypsy Melquiades arrives in the land-locked settlement of Macondo with his inventions from beyond the water, and the first of the Buendia family embarks on his craze for alchemy, readers around the world understood that a new kind of fiction had arrived. Though it was for Marquez's visions of levitating laundry and showers of butterflies that the coinage 'magic realism' came to be minted, the novel is loved no less for its understanding of the way the human psyche finds itself so frequently teetering on a terrifying pinnacle between longing and refusal than for its colossal inventions in the natural world. (Kirkus UK)
What the papers say:
'The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years' Salman Rushdie 'Should be required reading for the entire human race' New York Times
In Stock: 20 copies
