New York Times Book Review critic William Kennedy claimed, “One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race…Mr. Garcia Márques has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless is life.”

The book tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. The New York Times describes the novel, “An Irresistible work of storytelling, mixing the magic of the fairy tale, the realistic detail of the domestic novel and breadth of the family saga.”

Paul West of Book World adds, “Fecund, savage, irresistible….In all their loves, madness, and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths…the characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green pressure of nature itself.”