One Hundred Years Of Solitude

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)