Extract

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

A man stands before a firing squad and remembers the afternoon his father took him to discover ice. From that luminous opening, Gabriel García Márquez unfolds the saga of the Buendía family across seven generations in the mythical town of Macondo, where the miraculous and the mundane share the same sentence without apology. Published in 1967, the novel drew on Colombia's Caribbean oral traditions to create a new mode of storytelling in which a woman ascends to heaven while hanging laundry and a plague of insomnia erases an entire village's memory. Beneath the exuberance lies an architecture of repetition and fate, each generation replaying the errors of the last, until time itself curves into a circle from which only the reader escapes.