The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor » (Reissue)

A chief practitioner of the "magic-realist" style, Gabriel García Márquez's influence and importance lie in his crucial role of bringing Latin-American fiction to wider audiences while pioneering it at the same time. The Colombian-born Nobel winner tells fantastical tales of romance and heroism against an historic Latin American backdrop, always infusing believability by giving his writing a journalistic cast.

Translated by Randolf Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.