Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
A young man's devotion to one woman lasts more than fifty years, in a lush, romantic novel by the same author.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, follows several generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo. These seven books offer more magical realism and sweeping stories, from Latin America and beyond.
Gabriel García Márquez
A young man's devotion to one woman lasts more than fifty years, in a lush, romantic novel by the same author.
Isabel Allende
Three generations of the Trueba family live through love, magic and political upheaval in an unnamed Latin American country, with rape and torture on the page.
Salman Rushdie
A boy born at the stroke of midnight on India's independence day finds his life tied to the new nation, in an exuberant, long and inventive novel.
Laura Esquivel
The youngest daughter of a Mexican ranch family is forbidden to marry and pours her feelings into cooking, with a recipe opening each chapter.
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a talking cat and throws the city into chaos, in a darkly funny satire that also retells the story of Pontius Pilate.
Juan Rulfo
A man goes to his late mother's hometown to find his father and hears the voices of the dead, in a brief, haunting Mexican novel often called a forerunner of magical realism.
Gabriel García Márquez
A narrator reconstructs the killing of a young man in a small town where, strangely, almost everyone saw it coming.
For more García Márquez, start with Love in the Time of Cholera, a romance, or the shorter Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which centers on a murder. For magical realism inside a family saga, try The House of the Spirits, or Like Water for Chocolate for something lighter and shorter. Midnight's Children is the most demanding: long, dense and richly inventive. Pedro Páramo is brief but fragmentary, so expect to feel lost at first. The Master and Margarita has a different tone, comic and satirical. Content notes: One Hundred Years of Solitude includes incest, The House of the Spirits includes rape and torture, and Love in the Time of Cholera includes a relationship between an older man and a young girl.
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