This month’s read

A camping holiday is not the best place to start a book that you become so obsessed with that you cannot put it down!

For a start there are no sun loungers to lie on whilst the children amuse themselves in the pool or in the sand and secondly trying to read by torchlight in the evenings whilst not attract the local insect population through the canvas is not easy. A Hundred Years of Solitude took hold extremely quickly and all sensible thought was lost, moments were stolen at every opportunity to read just a few more pages. Tea lights and torch batteries were procured in bulk, all hope of early nights were lost in this wonderful, magical, page turner of a book.

First published in Spanish in 1967, it is the story of seven generations of the same family living in a village in Columbia, elements of the book are based around historical fact whilst others are Colombian national myths.

The New York Times said this book ‘should be required reading for the entire human race’ whilst Salman Rushdie described it as ‘the greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years’

Sometimes such high accolades actually mean a book is not suitable read for the average mum on the street but that is not the case with One Hundred Years of Solitude it will thrill and enthrall from page one.