‘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.’ Thus begins Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the twentieth century’s most lauded works of fiction. In Gabriel García Márquez, Stephen M. Hart provides a new insight into García Márquez’s life and work as well as describing how the political struggles of Latin America have influenced his writing, from Love in the Time of Cholera to Memories of my Melancholy Whores.

This book provides a new perspective on García Márquez’s use of ‘creative false memory’ and magical realism. There are five ingredients that are critical to García Márquez’s writing – magical realism, a shortened and broken portrayal of time, punchy one-liners, dark and absurd humour, and political allegory – and these elements help to explain the extraordinary allure of García Márquez’s work, as well as providing fascinating insight into his approach to writing. The divisions between García Márquez’s everyday life and his life as a writer are also explored, as is the connection in his work between family history and national history.

Gabriel García Márquez presents an original portrait of this renowned writer and is a must-read for fans of his work, as well as those interested in magical realism, Latin American fiction and modern literature.