Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin

This mammoth biography takes in 80 plus years of the life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as setting that life inside some extremely eventful Latin American history. It’s not exactly the official biography - Gerald Martin describes himself as the ‘officially tolerated’ biographer - but it’s about as well-researched and entertaining as you could expect. The initial hard work in any biography, genealogy followed by childhood stories, is here, but once Garcia Marquez reaches adulthood the book becomes extremely enjoyable, and once he writes One Hundred Years of Solitude it really hits a peak. Martin seems to have been manipulated a little by the myths Garcia Marquez has spun around himself, but mostly he repeats extraordinary claims to debunk, or even augment them. The most valuable purpose of the book is to set Garcia Marquez in historical perspective, showing the political climates that shaped him as well as South America in general, and also to show western readers how Marquez has become more than a writer in South America – he’s a personality of continental importance, and still writing too. [Keir Hind]