STRANGE PILGRIMS（ISBN=9781400034697）

Filled with greedy joys, with small pleasures, polished like apples against a sleeve Observer Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself New Statesman Celebratory and full of strange relish at life's oddness. The stories draw their strength from Marquez's generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent William Boyd

In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact. In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, Garcia Marquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the emigre experience.

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 as a Penguin Paperback from August 2007. He is the author of several novels, works of non-fiction 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.