He is perhaps the most acclaimed, revered and widely read writer of our time, and in this first volume of a planned trilogy - a book that has already become a bestseller in its Spanish-language edition both abroad and in the United States - the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins to tell us the story of his life. Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Garcia Marquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the beginning of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, the aliveness of a conversation with the reader: a tale of people, places and events as they occur to him: family, work, politics, books and music, his beloved Colombia, parts of his history until now undisclosed and incidents that would later appear, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction. And as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life - in this instance, his own. A vivid, powerful, beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a writer and as a man.