Where to start with Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian novelist, 1927–2014.

Best Gabriel García Márquez book to start with: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), on 10 of the 11 lists it could have made.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the book to begin with. It follows the Buendía family in the town of Macondo across many generations, and the lists agree on it by a long way. The names repeat, so many readers jot down a family tree as they go.

Love in the Time of Cholera is the one to read next. It is a love story spread across decades, warmer and easier to follow, and the lists like it too. García Márquez was Colombian and wrote in Spanish, so you are reading a translation: Gregory Rabassa translated the first and Edith Grossman the second, and both are well regarded.

Neither is a slow book once it gets going. If you only have time for one, read One Hundred Years of Solitude. If you tried it and bounced off, Love in the Time of Cholera is a gentler way back in.