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encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and
Almost Like Being in Love (novel) Almost Like Being in Love (novel) Almost Like Being in Love is a 2004 gay-fiction romance novel by author Steve Kluger. Like his previous novel "Last Days of Summer", "Almost Like Being in Love" is an epistolary novel; the story is told primarily through diary entries, newspaper clippings, office documents, letters, e-mails, menus, post-it notes and checklists, with only minor reliance on narrative. Kluger uses experiences and people from his life as inspiration for his novels. The book centers around the relationship between two men, Travis and Craig, who meet and fall in love in 1978, during their senior year