Penguin Books Australia

Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript...

'My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house'.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was twenty-three, emerging as a young man and experimenting as a writer, when his mother asked him to come with her, back to the village of Aracataca, back to his grandparents' house and the memories of his Colombian childhood. In this first part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, the Nobel prize-winning author returns to...

Wending his way down the Magdalena River towards the Caribbean with his faithful servant, José...

Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings, stranded in a young couple's back garden; a town plagued by dying...

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.

'Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow.'

Whie her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Eréndira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table - and is fast asleep when it topples over.....

'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'

When newly-wed Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Angela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers...

'Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside.'

Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance...