Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – The Bell Bookshop

Autumn Of The Patriarch

Emma — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Gabriel Garcìa Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, explores the loneliness of power in Autumn of the Patriarch.

'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'

As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their arrogant, manically violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?

Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Márquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.

'Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its total originality' Vogue

'Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator' Guardian

'Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie

One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Emma — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the book which put South America on the literary map, MÃ¡rquez tells the haunting story of a community in which the political, the personal and the spiritual worlds intertwine.

Love In The Time Of Cholera

Emma — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A CLASSIC STORY OF ENDURING LOVE FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR

‘One of the greatest love stories I have ever read’ Oprah, featured in Oprah’s Book Club
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‘It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love’

Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half-century, Flornetino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina.

When Fermina’s husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?
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‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton

‘An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate and extremely funny’ Sunday Telegraph

‘An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women’ The Times

Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

Emma — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Angela Vicario's new husband is furious when he discovers she's not a virgin, and he returns her to her family home. Angela's mother beats her and her brothers set out to find the man who violated her. Waking to the thoughts of the previous night's revelry, Santiago Nasar is unaware that there are people who want to kill him.

No One Writes To The Colonel

Emma — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcìa Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, tells a powerful tale of poverty and undying hope in his moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel.

'The Colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one spoonful left'

Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive. But on Fridays the postman comes – and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the Colonel's ageing heart.

For fifteen years he's watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he'll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season. But until then the bird – like the Colonel and his wife – must somehow be fed. . .

'Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do' Salman Rushie

'Masterly. He dazzles us with powerful effect' New Statesman

'One of this century's most evocative writers' Anne Tyler

Love In The Time Of Cholera

Emma — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics.

Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love tragically rejected. Instead Fermina marriesdistinguished doctor Juvenal Urbino, while Florentino can only wait silently for her. He can never forget his first and only true love. Then, fifty-one years, nine months and four days later, Fermina’s husband dies unexpectedly. At last Florentino has another chance to declare his feelings and discover if a passion that has endured for half a century will remain unrequited, in a rich, fantastical and humane celebration of love in all its many forms.

Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of several novels, including Leaf Storm (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

If you enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera, you might like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

‘The nearest thing to sensual pleasure prose can offer’
Daily Telegraph

‘An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women… among Márquez’s best fiction’
The Times

‘The greatest luxury … is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality … the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century’s most evocative writers’
Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist

Living To Tell The Tale

Emma — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 00:00:00 +0000

He is perhaps the most acclaimed, revered and widely read writer of our time, and in this first volume of a planned trilogy – a book that has already become a bestseller in its Spanish-language edition both abroad and in the United States – the Nobel Laureate Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez begins to tell us the story of his life. Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans GarcÃa Márquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the beginning of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, the aliveness of a conversation with the reader: a tale of people, places and events as they occur to him: family, work, politics, books and music, his beloved Colombia, parts of his history until now undisclosed and incidents that would later appear, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction. And as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life – in this instance, his own. A vivid, powerful, beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez as a writer and as a man.