Living to tell the tale - Gabriel Garca Mrquez

In Living to Tell the Tale Gabriel Garca Mrquez - winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude - recounts his personal experience of returning to the house in which he grew up and the memories that this visit conjured.

'My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house'

Gabriel Garca Mrquez was twenty-three, a young man experimenting with his writing when this mother asked him to come back with her to the village of his grandparents and the memories of his Colombian childhood.

In the first part of Gabriel Garca Mrquez's memoir, the Nobel Prize-winning author returns to the atmosphere and influences that shaped his formidable imagination and formed the basis of his world-famous, and much-loved, fiction.

'A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn't find. A thrilling miracle of a book' The Times

'A marvellous journey. Never less than a miracle' Sunday Times

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

As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garca Mrquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include Autumn of the Patriarch, Bon Voyage Mr.President, Collected Stories, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in his Labyrinth, Innocent Erndira and Other Stories, In the Evil Hour, Leaf Storm, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, News of a Kidnapping, No-one Writes to the Colonel, Of Love and Other Demons, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and Strange Pilgrims.