The Autumn of the Patriarch; Innocent Erendira; Chronicle of a Death Foretold; No One Writes to the Colonel; All by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Penguin, £6.99, £5.99, £5.99 and £4.99 respectively in UK)

The first of these four works is about a vaguely delineated Caribbean dictator who has died after ruling for 200 years (repeat, 200 years). It is largely told in a kind of stream-of-consciousness monotone, and I cannot deny that in spite of the author's huge and almost unquestionable reputation, I found it tedious and rather contrived overall. The second is a collection of stories, and the last two are novellas, with the typical Marquez ingredients of violence, black humour, extreme callousness and a hovering, quasi-surrealist sense of mystery.