One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the invented Caribbean town of Macondo, from its founding by the dreamer-patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia to its final erasure, through wars, banana-plantation massacres, incestuous love, plagues of insomnia, and a rain that does not stop. Names recur, children are born with the traits of their great-grandparents, and solitude becomes the family's only reliable inheritance. The novel is the foundational text of Latin American magical realism and one of the most widely translated novels of the twentieth century.
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What you might want to know about One Hundred Years of Solitude
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The Buendia family founds the town of Macondo in the jungle and lives there across a century of inventions, civil wars, ghosts, and recurring names, as the place that made them slowly returns to dust.
Yes. One Hundred Years of Solitude follows seven generations of the Buendia family, with many characters sharing names. Garcia Marquez's prose is rich and digressive. Most readers either embrace the magical-realist sweep or set the book aside.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, with One Hundred Years of Solitude cited as his most important work. The novel itself did not win the prize, but it is the work most associated with his Nobel.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published in 1967 by A Bard Book.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is 417 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, One Hundred Years of Solitude takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a standalone novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not part of a series.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
