Three Novellas

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 249. Publisher's green cloth, titled in gilt to spine; tea green endpapers. Jacket design by Peter Dyer with an illustration by Sarah Perkins (priced '£14.99 net in UK only' to front flap).

A collection of three novellas, issued as Collected Novellas in the U.S. by Harper Collins, and originally published individually. Marquez's first novella, Leaf Storm (Harper & Row, New York, 1972), was originally published in 1955 under the title La hojarasca by Ediciones- S.L.B., Bogotá, Colombia. It introduces us to the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, later to be celebrated in his landmark novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

No One Writes to the Colonel (Harper & Row, New York, 1968), a novella about a retired colonel who waits in vain for his pension, was originally published in 1961 as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba by Aguirre Editor, Colombia. García Márquez considered it his best book and claimed that he had to write Cien años de soledad in order for people to read it. Basis for the 1999 film, directed by Arturo Ripstein, and starring Fernando Luján as the colonel, Marisa Paredes as Lola and Salma Hayek as Julia.

And Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1983), a story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence, was published simultaneously in 1981 under the title Crónica de una muerte anunciada, by Editorial La Oveja Negra, Bogotá, Colombia, Editorial Diana, Colonia del Valle, México, Editorial Sudamericana, Argentina, and Editorial Bruguera, España. Basis for the 1987 film, by Francesco Rosi, starring Ornella Muti, Rupert Everett, and Anthony Delon.