Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez Wistful love story set beside the Caribbean, it is also about time, love, age, memory, death, chaos, passion and the spirit of place.

I loved this book.  Marquez writes so beautifully that you can't help but be drawn into the world that he creates.  The story is about the lives of three people in a small town somewhere in the Caribbean.  (If Marquez said where the story took place, I must have missed it).  It follows the life of Fermina Daza--a beautiful young woman, Juvenal Urbino--the rich doctor that she marries and grows comfortable with, and Florentino Ariza--the reclusive man who loved her as a young girl and waits his whole life just for the chance to be with her again.

As the story follows the lives of these three people, it really talks about the process of growing old and how our memories affect our perception of past events.  And it also serves as a vision of how the process of loving changes as we get older.  You follow the characters into old age and realize that their capacity for loving (and erotic behavior) is not diminished.

I enjoyed this book for many of the same reasons that I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude so much.  The stories that Marquez spins are magical and the characters are human.  Everyone should take a crack at reading his stuff..