A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel Garcia Marquez'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 Garcia Marquez (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 Marquez'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