Series:

Picador Books

6 total works

Cover of Leaf Storm

Leaf Storm

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Published January 1973
As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognisable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay. Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial - and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.

Cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude
In the book which put South America on the literary map, Marquez tells the haunting story of a community lost in the depths of that almighty continent where time passes slowly. A poetic masterpiece whose rich and powerful language easily survives the translation from Spanish, this is the most celebrated text of magic realism, the literary movement which has dominated world fiction for the last thirty years.

Cover of No One Writes to the Colonel
Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive. But on Fridays the postman comes - and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the General's ageing heart. For fifteen years he's watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he'll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season. But until then the bird - like the Colonel and his wife - must somehow be fed.

Cover of The Autumn of the Patriarch
First the vultures arrive. Then the revolutionaries burst into the crumbling residential a place of a modern Latin American country to find the rotting corpse of the dictator whose shadow had loomed over the advancing corruption of their country for almost a century. There was a time when his power seemed to have no limit, when dauntless adulators proclaimed him corrector of earthquakes and other errors of God, when his messianic appearances among the peasants inspired awe and love. But as his infamous regime tightened its grip of cruelty and terror, the dictator himself became afraid, withdrawing into the sanctuary of his crowded palace, where the mistresses, concubines and tribes of children he surrounded himself with could not offset the loneliness of the autumn of his power - the autumn of his pain. Gabriel Garcia Marquez weaves a narrative backwards and forwards through time, telling the story of the depot general - lover and son, puppet and symbol, man and monster - through the eyes of those who adored and served him, of those who feared and despised him.

Cover of Three Novellas

Three Novellas

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Published 2 September 1982

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a compelling, moving story exploring injustice and mob hysteria by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on'

Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen - including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why. . .

'A masterpiece' Evening Standard

'A work of high explosiveness - the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel' The Times

'Brilliant writer, brilliant book' Guardian

Cover of In Evil Hour

In Evil Hour

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Published 1 January 1900
When a young man is shot in a small South American village, it heralds the start of a series of sudden tragedies - of floods and ugly lampoons, which remind the villagers of the decomposition of their social order. This is an evocation of corruption, both political and individual.