One Hundred Years of Solitude - Harper Perennial Olive Editions by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Paperback

About the Book

"One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's now available as a special Harper Perennial Olive Edition."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." --William Kennedy, National Observer

One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's now available as a special Harper Perennial Olive Edition.

The story of the village of Macondo, as seen through the lives of seven generations of the Buendía family, is told with Marquez's trademark mastery of magical realism. The founders, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, establish the village while camping on a riverbank, after José dreams about a "city of mirrors" that would reflect the world. The people of the town - which is solitary and disconnected from the outside world, save for a band of nomads that visits every year - experience extraordinary events across generations, until they are finally unable to hide from the the newly independent government of Colombia. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, making it a classic of truly global proportions.

Harper Perennial Olive Editions are exclusive small-format editions of some of our bestselling and celebrated titles, and feature unique hand-drawn cover illustrations. All Olive Editions are available for a limited time only.

Review Quotes

"This extraordinary novel obliterates the family tree in a prose jungle of overwhelming magnificence. . . . You have the sense of living along with the Buendías (and the rest), in them, through them, and in spite of them, in all their loves, madnesses and wars, their allegiances, compromises, dreams and deaths. . . . Like the jungle itself, this novel comes back again and again, fecund, savage and irresistible." - Paul West, Washington Post
"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." - William Kennedy, National Observer
"At 50 years old, García Márquez's masterpiece is as important as ever. . . To experience a towering work like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to be reminded of the humility we should all feel when trying to assert what is true and what is false." - LitHub
"One Hundred Years of Solitude is substantive and substantial, and its prose precise for the simple reason that its sentences are too exquisite to be inessential. It is a novel on which is bestowed the laurels usually awarded to great works of frugal prose. Yet its genius is in the operatic telling." - USA Weekend
"One Hundred Years of Solitude offers plenty of reflections on loneliness and the passing of time. It can also be seen as a caustic commentary on the evils of war, or a warm appreciation of familial bonds. García Márquez has urgent things to say that still feel close to home, 50 years after the book was first published." - USA Today (four stars)
"One of the seminal works of 20th century Latin American fiction, it is a classic." - Variety
One of the Landmarks of Modern Literature - New York Public Library
"[This novel] is very special. . . . An expansive legend of a town and family, a political parable, an instrument of rare magic that performs astonishing miracles of transformation. It is a comic masterpiece. It is intelligent. It is slippery with the juice of life." - Newsweek
"A fabulous creation of magic, and metaphor, and myth. . . . To depict a world so fabulous, so exotic, so extravagant in its comic and tragic effects and yet so palpably real is a magnificent achievement." - William McPherson, Washington Post
"No other writer in our time has operated on so vast a scale. None has approached his literary achievement. . . . [García Márquez is] the most important writer of the second half of the twentieth century in any language." - The Nation
"The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years." - Salman Rushdie
"The greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote." - Pablo Neruda
"You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. . . . With a single bound, Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either. Dazzling." - John Leonard, New York Times
"Unofficially, it's everybody's favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time--from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Junot Díaz. . . . Sexy, entertaining, experimental, politically radical, and wildly popular all at once." - Vanity Fair
"An irresistible work of storytelling, mixing the magic of the fairy tale, the realistic detail of the domestic novel and the breadth of the family saga." - New York Times