One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel that invented magical realism as a household concept—García Márquez tells a century of Colombian family history where the extraordinary arrives as casually as rain, and you simply accept it. The Buendía family cycles through war, desire, and self-destruction with a cosmic inevitability that Harold Bloom called impossible to stop reading mid-sentence. This is one of those books that changes what literature feels like to you afterward.