"It asks to be read more than twice, and the rewards are dazzling"

--Observer

"Delights with itsquirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its grandeur, by the solemn reverberations of its imagery and above all by its total originality.A baroquelegend"

--Vogue

"Marquez is the master weaver of the real and the conjectured.His descriptive power astounds"

--New Statesman

In an unnamed Caribbean country the citizens creep into the decaying presidential palace and find their dictator of some two hundred years stone dead. What follows is a heartfelt and uncompromising exploration of corruption and tyranny at the hands of a lonely and twisted man - the dictator in all his many guisees is at last brilliantly exposed.