No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In this long-awaited autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife.

The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction. Here is Garcia Marquez's shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer.

Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves, Living to Tell the Tale is a work of enchantment.