Latin American Masterpieces

1

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

Seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, Colombia, from its founding through war, plague, and eventual erasure. The novel that defined magical realism and won García Márquez the Nobel Prize.

1967 Colombia

2

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days for Fermina Daza to be widowed so he can renew his declaration of love. García Márquez's most romantic novel, set in an unnamed Caribbean port city.

1985 Colombia

3

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges

Seventeen short stories — many taking the form of reviews of imaginary books — that invent libraries, labyrinths, and encyclopaedias of non-existent worlds. The collection that established Borges as a world literary figure.

1944 Argentina

4

The Aleph

Jorge Luis Borges

Seventeen stories including the title piece, in which a point in space contains all other points, allowing one to see everything simultaneously. Along with Ficciones, the collection that defines Borges's mature short fiction.

1949 Argentina

5

Hopscotch

Julio Cortázar

A novel that can be read in two ways — straight through, or in a "hopscotch" order indicated by the author — following Argentine intellectual Horacio Oliveira in Paris and Buenos Aires. A landmark of the Latin American Boom.

1963 Argentina

6

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo

Juan Preciado travels to the Mexican village of Comala to find his father Pedro Páramo, only to discover it populated entirely by the dead. This 112-page novel, once rejected by two publishers, became one of the most influential in Latin American literature.

1955 Mexico

7

The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

Four generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed South American country, from the early 20th century through a coup modelled on Pinochet's 1973 takeover of Chile. Allende began the novel as a letter to her dying grandfather.

1982 Chile

8

Eva Luna

Isabel Allende

The illegitimate daughter of an Indian servant and a dying Italian scientist becomes a storyteller whose tales shape reality. One of Allende's most exuberant novels, a celebration of narrative and female resilience.

1987 Chile