Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, started his literary career with the publication of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor..

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

'The Story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic'

-Independent

' A master storyteller'

-Daily Mail

'Garcia Marquez is a retailer of wonders'

-Sunday Times