News of a Kidnapping ISBN=9780141032504

　　Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron; ruthless manipulator, brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Medellin cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts. Terrified of the new Colombian President's determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages. In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Marquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark and volatile months.

　　Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927- ) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. His most recent book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is his first new novel to be published in a decade and is available as a Penguin Paperback from August 2007. He is the author of several novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories, including Leaf Storm (1955); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

　　Marquez uses his novelist's instinct for emotional drama to give the reader a wonderfully immediate sense of his subjects' ordeal: their spiraling hopes and fears, their fantasies of escape, their desperation and despair. -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Compellingly readable. A book with all the panache of Marquez's fiction, hitting home rather harder The Sunday Times A story only a writer of Marquez's stature could tell so brilliantly. A tour de force Mail on Sunday The great strength of the book is the authority of its details. There is so much here that, as we say, no one would make up Guardian