Central concerns will be the rags to riches element of García Márquez's story, the tension in his life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing; and between power, solitude and love; the contrast between his Caribbean background and the gloomier authoritarianism of highland Bogotá; and his conscious but nonetheless extraordinary turn away from Macondo, magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude after those interlinked phenomena had brought him fame and unimagined wealth.

Martin is considered by García Márquez to be his ‘official' biographer and he has met the novelist and conducted interviews with him at regular intervals throughout the 15-year research period. He has also interviewed at least 300 other persons, including Fidel Castro, Felipe González, several presidents of Colombia, writers like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alvaro Mutis, the author's wife and sons, his mother, his brothers and sisters, his literary agent and translators, and most of his best friends and professional collaborators (as well as some detractors).

This biography is not only based on Martin's unique experience of García Márquez and his milieux over the last two decades but also on a wealth of sources, which it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any other biographer to replicate.