Well, the clue’s in the name: Garcia Marquez carpets his hero’s final morning with warnings, omens, secrets held in plain sight, reluctant assassins, and the kinds of just-missed opportunities usually found in the penultimate scene of a Shakespeare tragedy, but his death still speeds inevitably towards him. Narrated looking back from years later, the forces at play in this novel(la) are two sides of the same coin, memory and fate, and there’s no real contest about which is the stronger. A perfect intro to this Nobel laureate for anyone who’s confused about whether they’re allowed to like “Cholera” (because paedophilia) and/or doesn’t want to spend literally* a hundred years reading “One Hundred Years”**.
*Not literally.
**Though if you have read “One Hundred Years”, see if you can spot where one of its characters makes a cameo-by-reference.