Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gerald Martin Bloomsbury HK$242

Two thousand pages into his biography of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gerald Martin realised that perhaps he would never finish his project. With his subject past 80, the English academic decided the much longer biography would have to wait and, while Marquez was still alive, he would produce a 'relatively compact narrative'. This brick of a book, which consumed 17 years of Martin's life, is that short version. The author of what Martin says is the 'world's first truly 'global' novel', One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Marquez has been a celebrity for half a century. Martin spent about a month in total with Marquez and connects the strands of his life with help from interviews conducted with everyone from friends such as Fidel Castro to peers including Mario Vargas Llosa. Magical realism is discussed along with Latin American politics and familial influences. Fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude will find out who sparked the opening line: 'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.'