News of a Kidnapping (37 page)

‘The vigour and coherence of Márquez’s vision, the brilliance and beauty of his imagery, the narrative tension … coursing through his pages … makes it difficult to put down’
Daily Telegraph

At the age of forty-six General Simón Bolívar,
who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolívar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all
his life …

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‘A gripping tale of survival’
The Times

‘On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Colombia …’

In 1955, eight crew members of
Caldas
, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on
a raft for ten days without food or water. Márquez retells the survivor’s amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
was Márquez’s first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, 
El Espectador
, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

‘The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks
over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic’
Independent

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First published in Spanish as
Noticia de un Secuestro
by Mondadori (Grijalbo Comercial, S. A.) 1996
This English translation first published in Great Britain by Random House 1996
Published in Penguin Books 1998
This edition published 2014

Copyright © Gabriel García Márquez, 1996
Copyright © Mondadori (Grijalbo Comercial, S. A.), 1996

Cover © Clive Frost / Lensmodern

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-91733-7