The story of a shipwrecked sailor : who drifted on a life raft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spur

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 form 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 TimesAs one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories.

Those published in translation by Penguin include Autumn of the Patriarch, Bon Voyage Mr.President, Collected Stories, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in his Labyrinth, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, In the Evil Hour, Leaf Storm, Living to Tell the Tale, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, News of a Kidnapping, No-one Writes to the Colonel, Of Love and Other Demons and Strange Pilgrims.