Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence, since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally - after fifty-one years, nine months and four days - Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?
'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.