The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor ISBN=9780141032443

'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, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, "El Espectador", in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927- ) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. His most recent book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is his first new novel to be published in a decade and is available in paperback from Penguin from August 2007. He is the author of several novels and collections of short stories, including Leaf Storm (1955); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.