"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love". Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza's impassioned advances and married Dr Juvenal Urbino instead.
Vera Székács Books
'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin' Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a sensual and hypnotic journey through the mind of a man discovering love for the first time after a lifetime filled with hundreds of different women. The nights spent sleeping side-by-side with his 'Delgadina' fill his soul with an unexpected longing. He feels her presence when she is not there. The now passionate meditations of his newspaper columns are bound up in love and received by a rapturous, growing readership, and in his imagination - as real for him as memories - he sees them together as they might have been. This is a story of one man's reassessment of his life as he awakens to the transformative power of love.