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  • Published: 23 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241968604
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.99

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor




Márquez Day: A celebration of one of the world's most loved writers available in ebook for the first time

'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia.'

In 1955, eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Márquez retells the survivor's amazing tale, from his loneliness and thirst, to his determination to survive.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was Márquez's first major, and controversial, work, published in Colombian newspaper El Espectador, in 1955. It is being re-issued on Gabriel García Márquez's birthday to celebrate the publication of his books as ebooks for the first time.

  • Published: 23 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241968604
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 near Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Living to Tell the Tale, among other works of fiction and non-fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He lives in Mexico City.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on 6 March 1927 in Aractaca, Colombia, and died on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City, aged 87.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for a body of work that includes novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories.

His most famous works include Leaf Storm (1955), In Evil Hour (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch(1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), News of a Kidnapping (1996), Living to Tell the Tale (2002) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004).

Also by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

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Praise for The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic.

The Independent