Let me introduce you to José Arcadio Buendía–adventurer, colonist and founder of a lineage that is to last for a hundred years. Somewhere in a fictionalized Colombia and isolated from the rest of the world, a dynastic history unrolls that is filled with violence, mercenary sex and frustrated love. It is an earthy history that is subject to an inexorable and cruel fate and that condemns five generations of Buendfas to lives of mental and emotional solitude.

José Buendía, we are told, had been a friend of Melquíades, a gypsy who, shortly before his death, had left José a parchment purporting to reveal to him the future destiny of his descendants. And a mysterious destiny it was to be! Pure lust and strict adherence to a code of wifely duty, but never love, motivated the procreation of Buendfa children. For the family was bedevilled by a strange fascination–that of nephew for aunt and of aunt for nephew. As the generations passed, this obsession came increasingly close to realization in an act of physical love. But the dread of producing a child ‘with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the tip’ prevented this time and again. Yet during the last phase of the Buendfas' history, such a child was actually produced- ‘the only one in a century who had been engendered with love’.