Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005

For his ninetieth birthday, a newspaper columnist gives himself a night with a fourteen year-old virgin, a night in which nothing happens. Instead as he continues to see her he comes to treasure her innocence, and with his newspaper column finding a fresh vigour he at last achieves some semblance of fame and success that he has gone without for too long. This is a kind of belated, nonagenarian coming-of-age story that’s thankfully a long way from the ‘memoirs of a dirty old man’ that a reader could reasonably be half expecting from its title, because it focuses on the humour of old age rather than any melancholy yearnings for lost youth. Lively and natural, and it ends brilliantly.   PY

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