Five best novels on time and memory

Edmund Morris is the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex; the concluding book in the trilogy, Colonel Roosevelt, is now out from Random House.

For the Wall Street Journal, Morris named a five best list of novels on time and memory.

One title on the list:

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

The title hints at the vast chronology of this novel, as do the first words of its unforgettable opening ("Many years later, as he stood facing the firing squad ..."). But although generation after generation of the Buendia family lives and dies in the story's course, there is no real sense of time passing. All is dimensionless dream. One does not finish the book so much as awaken from it, crying like Caliban to "dream again."

Read about the other books on the list.

One Hundred Years of Solitude made Rebecca Stott's five best list of historical novels. It is on he lists of Lynda Bellingham's six best books, Walter Mosley's five favorite books, Eric Kraft's five most important books, and James Patterson's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue