Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, is one of the most popular writers of the last 50 years. Gerald Martin's superb achievement is to reveal the gritty, fascinating, and frequently humorous reality behind the books. While completely immersing himself in García Márquez's world, Martin never loses his critical perspective as he recounts a life that is as gripping and revealing as the writer's powerful journalism, and as complex and involving as any of his fictions.