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Gerald Martin is considered by Garcia Marquez to be his 'official' biographer and he has met the novelist and conducted interviews with him at regular intervals throughout a fifteen year research period. He has also interviewed at least 300 other people, including Fidel Castro, Felipe Gonzalez, several presidents of Colombia, writers including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alvaro Mutis, the author's wife and sons, his mother, brothers and sisters, his many literary translators and agent, and most of his best friends and professional collaborators (as well as some detractors).

This biography is not only based on Martin's unique experience of Garcia Marquez and his milieux over the last two decades but also on a wealth of sources, which will prove to be extremely difficult, if not impossible for any other biographer to replicate.

Central concerns will be the rags to riches element of Garcia Marquez's story, the tension in his life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing; and between power, solitude and love; the contrast between his Caribbean background and the gloomier authoritarianism of highland Bogota; and his conscious but nonetheless extraordinary turn away from Macondo, magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude after those interlinked phenomena had brought him fame and unimagined wealth.