Love in the Time of Cholera

A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics.

Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love tragically rejected. Instead Fermina marriesdistinguished doctor Juvenal Urbino, while Florentino can only wait silently for her. He can never forget his first and only true love. Then, fifty-one years, nine months and four days later, Fermina's husband dies unexpectedly. At last Florentino has another chance to declare his feelings and discover if a passion that has endured for half a century will remain unrequited, in a rich, fantastical and humane celebration of love in all its many forms.

Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of several novels, 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.

If you enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera, you might like Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The nearest thing to sensual pleasure prose can offer'
Daily Telegraph

'An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women... among Márquez's best fiction'
The Times

'The greatest luxury ... is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality ... the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century's most evocative writers'
Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. He studied at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writesto the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books arepublished by Penguin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in 2014.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a short-story writer, novelist, journalist and a screenwriter from Colombia. He was a reporter for a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, and also a foreign correspondent stationed in New York, Rome, Paris and Barcelona. Marquez is the author of numerous popular novels and short stories. He is well known for his unique literary style known as magical realism, in which he describes reality through magical events and elements. His most popular novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.