One Hundred Years of Solitude

A novel tracing seven generations of the Buendia family in Macondo, a fictional town modeled on Garcia Marquez's own childhood surroundings in Aracataca, Colombia, folding the ordinary and the fantastical into the same matter-of-fact narrative voice, a defining example of magical realism. Its treatment of repeating names, cyclical family fate and Macondo's own rise and eventual erasure has been read as an allegory of Colombian and, more broadly, Latin American history, from colonization through civil conflict to the disruptive arrival of foreign capital.