Living to Tell the Tale

Book excerpt: In Living to Tell the Tale Gabriel Garcia Marquez - winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude - recounts his personal experience of returning to the house in which he grew up and the memories that this visit conjured. 'My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house' Gabriel Garcia Marquez was twenty-three, a young man experimenting with his writing when this mother asked him to come back with her to the village of his grandparents and the memories of his Colombian childhood. In the first part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, the Nobel Prize-winning author returns to the atmosphere and influences that shaped his formidable imagination and formed the basis of his world-famous, and much-loved, fiction. 'A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn't find. A thrilling miracle of a book' The Times 'A marvellous journey. Never less than a miracle' Sunday Times 'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do' Salman Rushdie