The General in His Labyrinth

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most political novel tells the tragic story of General Simon Bolivar, the man who tried to unite a continent. Bolivar, who drove the Spanish from South America, where he is still known as ‘the Liberator’, is in Garcia Marquez’s brilliant re-imagining a hero who is also magnificently flawed. The novel follows his final journey down the Magdalena river in 1830, revisiting the scenes of his former glory and lamenting his lost dream of an alliance of American nations. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man, who seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him in the past to so many victories in both love and war. The General in his Labyrinth is an unforgettable portrait of a visionary from one of the greatest writers of our time. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.