Published in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ became “one of those extremely rare books that affected people’s ideas about the contemporary novel and also their sense of reality. This became true not only for his readers but also for the many more who eventually received such information, diluted and dispersed into popular culture, without being aware of its source. (A recent newspaper poll in Spain found ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ ranked just after the Bible and ‘Don Quixote’ in universal historical importance – surely the voters can’t all have read it?) Indeed, it is hard to conceive what our sense of the novel, or even of Latin America itself, would be like now had the writings of Gabriel García Márquez never existed.”