Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Cien años de soledad
“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.”
Begin ReadingOne Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of the Buendía family over seven generations — and the story of a continent. Set in the fictional town of Macondo, it begins with its founding and ends with its obliteration, predicted from the first page in a mysterious manuscript revealed at the end to have been the novel itself. Along the way: civil wars, yellow butterflies, a rain that lasts four years, a girl who ascends to heaven while folding laundry, and the inexorable logic of a family curse. It is the defining novel of magical realism and one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitudesold out within a week of its release. It has since been translated into 46 languages and has sold over 50 million copies. Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote.” In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This site is your guide to its world — from the jungles of Colombia to the Buendía household, from the Thousand Days' War to the banana company massacre, and from the magic of Macondo to its final, devastating apocalypse.