‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ Thus begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, with what some call one of the most gripping opening lines in a work of fiction. But though much attention has been devoted to Marquez’s earlier life and work, little has been written about Marquez during the years 1998-2008.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stephen M. Hart provides a succinct yet thorough look into Marquez’s life and environment. By interviewing Marquez’s family, Hart was able to gain a unique perspective on the author’s use of ‘creative false memory,’ providing new insight into the magical realism that dominates Marquez’s output. From these interviews and through his research, Hart defines five ‘magic’ ingredients that are critical to Marquez’s work – magical realism, a shortened and broken portrayal of time, punchy one-liners in dialogue, dark and absurd humour, and polit-ical allegory – and demonstrates how these elements help to explain the extraordinary allure of Marquez’s work.

Stephen M. Hart also locates the divisions between Marquez’s everyday life and his life as a writer, as well as the connection in his work between family history and national history. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a unique portrait of this key writer, from his childhood to the present, and a must-read for fans of Marquez as well as those interested in magical realism, South American fiction and modern literature.