Cien Anos de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude].

"One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the life of Macondo, a fictional town based in part of Garcia Marquez's hometown of Aracataca, Colombia, and seven generations of the founding family, the Buendias. He creates a complex world with characters and events that display the full range of human experience. For the reader, the pleasure of the novel derives from its fast-paced narrative, humor, vivid characters, and fantasy elements. In this 'magic realism', the author combines imaginative flights of fancy with social realism to give us images of levitating priests, flying carpets, a four-year-long rainstorm, and a young woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets" (NYPL Books of the Century 31). At the conclusion of the 1970's this book was voted by the editors of The New York Times Book Review to be not only the best book published in the last ten years but the book most likely to still be read one hundred years from then.