John King's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4.4

The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."

Recommended by Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and 9 others.

John King

Absolutely. Borges never published, for example, many more than four or five pages at a time, and his narrators tend to navigate that more abstract world of literature and ideas. Whereas what García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

When asked what books he recommended to his 18-year-old daughter Malia, Obama gave the Times a list that included The Naked and the Dead and One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects … I think she hadn’t read yet. Then there were some books that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting.” Here’s what he included: The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston [source]

Oprah Winfrey

CEO/O Network

Brace yourselves—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is as steamy, dense and sensual as the jungle that surrounds the surreal town of Macondo! [source]

2

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Jorge Luis Borges, James E. Irby, Donald A. Yates, Andre Maurois

4.5

Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface, Andre Maurois writes: "Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their w

Recommended by Caterina Fake, John King, and Nicholas Shakespeare.

John King

If you are going to think about Latin American literature, Borges is always a good place to start. [source]

Nicholas Shakespeare

No writer embodied libraries more than the immobile, blind Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges. [source]

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3

Conversation in the Cathedral

Mario Vargas Llosa, Gregory Rabassa

4.0

A Haunting tale of power, corruption, and the complex search for identity, Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel Apolinario Odría Amoretti. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has sl

Recommended by John King.

John King

It was a difficult choice because he has written some 14 major novels. He is a writer who changes with every novel, adopting a range of different styles. But when I was reading around the Nobel prize, I learned that all the Nobel committee members read this novel when they were deliberating about the prize. And even though I have about four favourite novels of his, that seemed a good reason for picking this one. Conversation in the Cathedral represents a time in the late 1960s when Vargas Llosa was still very committed to the hope of radical social change in Latin America. In this novel he analyses the nature of a corrupt, unjust, hypocritical society that was the Peru of his adolescence, under a military regime. He thought that if you could expose the nature of the corruption you might move on and replace it with something better. [source]

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4

The Hour of the Star

Clarice Lispector, Giovanni Pontiero

4.0

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Mary

Recommended by John King.

John King

With this choice I am giving just one out of a myriad of possible examples of women writing in Latin America, in a field that still tends to be dominated by big-name male writers. At the time that these male writers were reaching international prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, Clarice Lispector was writing with much less fanfare very interesting short stories, usually about a crisis in the consciousness of middle class Brazilian women. [source]

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5

2666 (2666 #1-5)

Roberto Bolaño, Natasha Wimmer

4.2

Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman—these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.

Recommended by John King.

John King

I have read this once and I keep dipping back into it because it is endlessly fascinating. Roberto Bolaño is a writer who has found a really important way of dealing with the horrors that the 1970s and subsequent decades have inflicted on Latin America. If you look at Borges, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, in a sense they grew up in times of optimism, of high modernism, with the hope, at least initially, that change might be possible. Whereas someone like Bolaño was a young man at the time of the Chilean coup in 1973. He drifted around and went into exile in Mexico and then moved to Spain, a witness to the end of the dream. [source]