The General in His Labyrinth explores the labyrinth of Bolívar's life through the narrative of his memories, in which "despair, sickness, and death inevitably win out over love, health, and life". Following the success of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis. He borrowed the setting—Bolívar's voyage down the Magdalena River in 1830—from Mutis. García Márquez spent two years researching the subject, encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and
The Time of the Angels the reader's imagination is addressed, responds and is satisfied." Also in the "New York Times", Charles Poore, while noting Murdoch's "preachy passages" and the book's "gothick novel" aspects, described her as a "born storyteller" and "The Time of the Angels" as the "newest and best" of her "excellent melodramas". In "The New York Review of Books" Denis Donoghue described the novel as "elegiac", "an anthology of defeats: magic, belief, prayer, love, and now perhaps poetry itself." "Kirkus Reviews" described the novel as a "mediocre work" partially because of her frequent novel writing, writing that the plot resembles her own earlier