"Garcí­a Márquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light."--John Updike, The New Yorker On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit--he has purchased hundreds of women--he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master's work. "Luminous....The cunning of Memories lies in the utter--and utterly unexpected--reliability of its narrator."--The New York Times Book Review "Masterful. Erotic. As hypnotizing as it is disturbing."--Los Angeles Times "Profoundly haunting....Fiction of the very highest order."--The Times Literary Supplement