Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small town in Colombia's Caribbean region, and spent his early childhood there with his maternal grandparents. In 1950 he left law school for journalism, working as a columnist and reporter for El Heraldo in Barranquilla. His first novella, Leaf Storm, took seven years to find a publisher; when it appeared in 1955 it introduced Macondo, a fictional village largely inspired by Aracataca.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) follows several generations of the Buendía family from the founding of Macondo and has sold more than 50 million copies; Gregory Rabassa's English translation appeared in 1970. It became the book most associated with magic realism, the style of placing magical events inside otherwise ordinary, realistic settings. He followed it with The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), a dictator novel; Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), a pseudo-journalistic reconstruction of the killing of Santiago Nasar; and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), which drew partly on his parents' courtship. He received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and died in Mexico City in 2014. Until August, a novel he had wanted destroyed, was published in 2024.

For a short way in, start with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The murder is made clear from the first sentence, so the suspense lies in how it came about, told in the manner of a reporter's reconstruction. The novella shows his journalism and his fiction working together.

Then read One Hundred Years of Solitude, his central book. Characters share names and traits with their namesakes across generations, so keeping a family tree at hand saves confusion. Love in the Time of Cholera is the natural third choice: a long love story about Florentino Ariza, who keeps loving Fermina Daza through her long marriage to another man.