Gabriel García Márquez may be the best-known, best-loved and most widely read serious writer of the last five decades. He is not only a major figure in world literature, and the most popular Nobel Prize winner of the last third of the twentieth century, but also a writer who exemplifies better than almost any other the world-historical transition between ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ fiction and the author whose work made ‘magical realism’ one of the most significant phenomena in ‘Third World’ or ‘postcolonial’ writing after the 1960s.

García Márquez’s writing is notable for its ability to reconcile things that do not usually go together. Like all great works of literature, his novels and short stories explore, both in breadth and in depth, what it is to be a human being and yet they also address specific historical moments and specific political circumstances. They are carefully structured, yet they give a sense of spontaneity and creativity. Few modern works are more evocative and more poetic, yet García Márquez’s powers as a traditional storyteller are unsurpassed in contemporary fiction. Moreover, his works refer to a world that is often grim and even sordid, yet no body of twentieth-century fiction has persuaded so many readers of the simple but sometimes elusive truth that life, despite everything, is beautiful and absolutely worth living. This book seeks to explain how this writer became the author of that world-changing novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and thereafter a Nobel Prize winner and a contemporary classic.