Love in the Time of Cholera

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. On seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the greatest adventures in modern literature. The man is Florentino Ariza, President of the Carribean River Boat Company; the woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza.

She has earache. He is bald and lame. Their journey up-river, at an age when they can expect 'nothing more in life', holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of an amor interruptus spanning half a century.

Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the most uplifting romances of our times. An epiphany to late-flowering love, it holds out the subversive promise that you can have what you wish for: you may just have to wait.