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News of a Kidnapping

By: Gabriel García Márquez
Narrated by: Christopher Salazar
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Publisher's summary

Consumed these past 20 years by a “biblical holocaust”, Colombia has endured leftist insurgencies, right-wing death squads, currency collapses, cholera epidemics, and, most recently and corrosively, drug trafficking. Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor. We are drawn into a world that, like some phantasmagorical setting in a great García Márquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.

©1996 by Gabriel García Márquez and the heirs of Gabriel García Márquez. Translation © 1997 by Gabriel García Márquez (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing
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Editorial Review

Explore a bizarre drama straight out of Colombian history in Gabriel García Márquez's nonfiction audiobook News of a Kidnapping. The world of legendary drug baron Pablo Escobar and his ruthless drug cartels collides with the Colombian government forces and the lives of ten ordinary men and women. García Márquez sets aside his usual magical realism to get down to the realities of the time a drug boss wreaked havoc on an already chaotic country.
Far from the indomitable women and men who venture to take on narcotics traffickers, this astonishing book instead opens with the personal history of common citizens who were simply trying to survive in their tumultuous nation. Though some had a political background, others swept up in the furor were related only tangentially to criticizing Escobar's chokehold on the nation. Gabriel García Márquez is masterful, almost poetic, as he covers everything from a kidnapped magazine editor and foreign correspondent to the tense negotiating table where Escobar used his hostages as pawns in this thrilling audiobook.
Christopher Salazar, a narrator familiar with Gabriel García Márquez's works, adds to the suspense of the account with a gripping narration. Every minute of this true-crime account thrums with tension. You'll be able to feel the strain of an entire nation holding their breath as they wait to hear what happens next. — Audible Latino Editor

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