Compellingly readable. A book with all the panache of Marquez's fiction, hitting home rather harder The Sunday Times Marquez uses his novelist's instinct for emotional drama to give the reader a wonderfully immediate sense of his subjects' ordeal: their spiraling hopes and fears, their fantasies of escape, their desperation and despair. New York Times The great strength of the book is the authority of its details. There is so much here that, as we say, no one would make up Guardian A story only a writer of Marquez's stature could tell so brilliantly. A tour de force Mail on Sunday

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927- ) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. His most recent book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is his first new novel to be published in a decade and is available as a Penguin Paperback from August 2007. He is the author of several novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories, 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.