The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor - Softcover

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241968607 ISBN 13: 9780241968604

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, started his literary career with the publication of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor . . .

'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia'

In 1955 eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Marquez retells the survivor's amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was Marquez's first major work, published in a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

'The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic' Independent

'A master storyteller' Daily Mail

'Garcia Marquez is a retailer of wonders' Sunday Times

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Translated by Randolph Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.

"A luminous narrative that rivals the most remarkable stories of man's struggles against the sea."--Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. He studied at the University of Botoga and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writesto the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books arepublished by Penguin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in 2014.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0241968607
• ISBN 13: 9780241968604
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128