Love in the Time of Cholera

Aug 18, 2025 6:53 AM

Author:Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics.

Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love tragically rejected. Instead Fermina marriesdistinguished doctor Juvenal Urbino, while Florentino can only wait silently for her. He can never forget his first and only true love. Then, fifty-one years, nine months and four days later, Fermina's husband dies unexpectedly. At last Florentino has another chance to declare his feelings and discover if a passion that has endured for half a century will remain unrequited, in a rich, fantastical and humane celebration of love in all its many forms.

Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of several novels, including Leaf Storm (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

If you enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera, you might like Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The nearest thing to sensual pleasure prose can offer'

Daily Telegraph

'An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women... among Márquez's best fiction'

The Times

'The greatest luxury ... is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality ... the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century's most evocative writers'

Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist

Reviews

This small novel is written with intense clarity - sentence for sentence it is still more unsettling than many unpleasant books that have been written since

—— Anne Enright

Conrad's narrative arsenal is awesome... Conrad deals in profundities if he deals in anything, but it is just his ability to clip his own wings in midflight, to puncture his ponderously magnificent dirigibles, that make him such an impressive literary performer

—— Sunday Times

Still the debate rages: is Conrad's novella an incisive critique of colonialism, or does it reinforce the very racist values it claims to unmask? Either way, his shrouded account of Marlow's journey into the "god-forsaken wilderness" of the Congo demands to be read. At its core lies the enigmatic, awesome Kurtz, and civilisation itself. "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth"

—— Guardian

Demands to be read

—— Guardian

Conrad broadened the descriptive range of the English language (his glowing and luxuriant delight in words, the haunting decor of the tropics, all that maritime terminology) more than any of his contemporaries

—— Independent

Exquisitely crafted

—— Tariq Ali , Writers’ and Critics’ pick of 2006, Guardian

The Mozart opera of novels and again a transcendent union of structure and content in which unhappy marriage is the reward for those who show a weakness of character and lifelong happiness is a province reserved only for those "who truly know themselves"

—— Kate Atkinson

For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta Stone of literature

—— Anna Quindlen

How could these novels ever seem remote...the gaiety is unextinguished today, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished, as comedies they are irresistibly and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be

—— Eudora Welty

That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with

—— Sir Walter Scott

The most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works

—— George Saintsbury (1894)

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

—— Martin Sixsmith , The Week

Historical fiction at its best

—— Orlando Figes , The Week

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2021*

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