My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house'. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was twenty-three, emerging as a young man and experimenting as a writer, when his mother asked him to come with her, back to the village of Aracataca, back to his grandparents' house and the memories of his Colombian childhood. In this first part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, the Nobel prize-winning author returns to the atmosphere and influences that shaped his formidable imagination and formed the basis of his world-famous, and much-loved, fiction.