2007 books
77) 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 I was half expecting, because it focuses on the humour of old age rather than any melancholy yearnings for lost youth. Lively and natural, and it ends brilliantly.