Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' is a meditation on romantic love in all its persistence, absurdity, and redemptive power. Florentino Ariza falls passionately in love with Fermina Daza when both are young; she eventually chooses to marry the respected Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. Florentino waits for fifty years, having hundreds of affairs while never abandoning his devotion to Fermina. When Dr. Urbino dies in old age, Florentino declares his love again, and the novel follows whether this impossible romance can be consummated after half a century. Garcia Marquez brings his distinctive magic realism to a story grounded in the realistic details of a Caribbean city over decades of change. The novel examines how love coexists with time's ravages, how passion transforms and endures, and how the cholera epidemic that periodically sweeps the city mirrors the fever of infatuation. The prose is lush and sensual, celebrating physical existence even as characters age and decay. Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, demonstrates here that he could craft a relatively intimate story with the same mastery he brought to the epic sweep of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' Readers will find one of the great novels about love in all its folly and grandeur.