News of a Kidnapping (Vintage International)

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author), EdithGrossman (Translator)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $19.31

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.92

  Set in Bogota, Colombia, the book narrates the kidnapping of a group of elderly women held hostage by Pablo Escobar's ruthless Medellin cartel. Intense personal suffering and psychological drama are set against the backdrop of a chaotic and corruptpolitical scene. The result is a highly charged story of lives in the balance. This brave piece of reportage is every bit as engaging as Marquez's fiction. 'I have never read anything which gave me a better sense of the way Colombia was in its worst times' - John Simpson in the Daily Telegraph

• Used

  Hardcover
  1997

  $4.27

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new book begins in November 1990 in Bogota, Columbia, when a group of gunmen ambush a car, kill the chauffeur and kidnap its two women passengers. The gunmen were working for Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellin course cocaine cartel, who in the early nineties kidnapped the relatives of a number of Colombia politcians in order to pressurise the government to suspend the policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the USA. Chronicle of a Kidnapping is at once a powerful, disturbing account of how Esobar undermined all Colombia's civil instutions by murder or bribery, and a moving exploration of the fate of Esobar's hostages, who were mostly middle-aged or elderly women.