I had read this many year ago, but it popped up on one of my various reading lists last week. It’s about a small town called Macondo, founded in the middle of the jungle (though also confusingly near the Caribbean, and not far from the Pacific) and the people who live there, especially the Buendía family who dominate Macondo for several generations. Along with the everyday political fare of revolutions, war, execution of the losing side, etc, there are recurrent surges of magical realism, alchemy, peculiar family relations, children born with tails, and towards the end an unfortunate Belgian who gets sucked into it all.

There is tremendous scope and vision here, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. I imagine that Márquez’s dense prose sings rather better in the original Spanish; the Penguin translation doesn’t really sing for me. Also I was mostly reading it in short bursts on planes which probably didn’t help. But it is very enjoyable.