Love in the Time of Cholera

First published in 1985, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is a luminous meditation on love, memory and the strange persistence of desire. Set in a Caribbean port city inspired by the author’s native Colombia, the novel follows Florentino Ariza, who devotes more than half a century to his passion for Fermina Daza, the woman who once rejected him and went on to marry the distinguished Dr Juvenal Urbino. As the years pass, García Márquez traces the private lives of his characters through courtship, marriage, infidelity, ageing and loss, revealing the many forms that love can take.

Less concerned with youthful romance than with the transformations of feeling over a lifetime, the novel brings García Márquez’s sensuous prose and wry observations of human folly to a story both intimate and expansive. Its richly imagined world bears the unmistakable influence of magical realism, though here the extraordinary often resides in the ordinary rhythms of life itself. Alongside its reflections on devotion and mortality, the book offers a vivid portrait of a changing society, where convention, class and time shape even the most private affections. One of the great love stories of modern literature, Love in the Time of Cholera stands as a distinctive achievement in the work of the Colombian Nobel laureate, who finds in the long passage of years not an answer to love, but its enduring mystery.

From the book

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

On Love in the Time of Cholera

“There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too.”

— Thomas Pynchon, The New York Times Book Review