STRANGE PILGRIMS

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of unforgettable stories about distinctive South American individuals in Europe from the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. ''The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha'' The twelve stories here tell of Latin Americans adrift in Europe: a bereaved father in Rome for an audience with the Pope carries a box shaped like a cello case; an aging streetwalker waits for death in Barcelona with a dog trained to weep at her grave; a panic-stricken husband takes his wife to a Parisian hospital to treat a cut and never sees her again. Combining terror and nostalgia, surreal comedy and the poetry of the commonplace, Strange Pilgrims is a triumph of storytelling by our most brilliant writer. ''Celebratory and full of strange relish at life''s oddness, the stories draw their strength from Márquez''s generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent'' William Boyd ''The most important writer of fiction in any language'' Bill Clinton ''Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself'' New Statesman As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel García Márquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include Autumn of the Patriarch, Bon Voyage Mr. President, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Collected Stories, The General in his Labyrinth, In Evil Hour, Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Leaf Storm, Living to Tell the Tale, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, News of a Kidnapping, No One Writes to the Colonel, Of Love and Other Demons, and The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.