In One Hundred Years of Solitude, time does not behave as we expect.

Generations repeat names, histories echo earlier mistakes, and the past never quite settles into the past.

“Time was not passing… it was turning in a circle.”

Márquez understood something many families quietly recognise: memory rarely travels in straight lines. Stories return, patterns repeat, and lives are shaped by echoes of what came before.

His village of Macondo feels mythical, yet its concerns are deeply human. Love, ambition, regret, loneliness, and the weight of history pass from one generation to the next, until the boundary between past and present begins to blur.

Reading Márquez reminds us that history is not always a line moving forward.

Sometimes it is a circle we only recognise once we have walked it.

Over to you: tell me about a text you’ve read in which history seemed to be going round in circles.