Gabriel García Márquez is the greatest writer of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Prize, author of the world-famous novels 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Love in the Time of Cholera' and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch'.

'I always wanted to write a book about absolute power' — so the author defined the main theme of his work.

The dictator of an unnamed Latin American country has been in power for so long that he no longer remembers how he came to it. He is at once a man and a living myth, a puppeteer and a marionette in the hands of Fate. He is utterly alone in his enormous palace, where the real and the unreal coexist in the most bizarre way.

He wants and fears death. But… is there death for the embodiment of a legend?

Perhaps the ruler will become happy only when he dies and realizes that for him 'the countless time of eternity has at last come to an end'.