LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA <i> by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Penguin Books: $8.95) </i>

This extraordinary novel, rivaled only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s unparalleled “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction in 1988.

Florentino Ariza’s love for Fermina Daza has lasted, largely unrequited, for 51 years, nine months and four days. As a teen-ager he falls in love with her from a distance, and they begin a passionate correspondence. But Fermina’s father breaks off their epistolary courtship by sending Fermina to live with distant relatives.

Upon her return, Fermina falls in love instead with the more urbane and aristocratic Juvenal Urbino, the town’s leading physician, who develops numerous cures for the cholera epidemics.

Fermina marries Juvenal and their marriage is mostly happy. But it is Florentino’s passion for Fermina, which endures 50 years of neglect and indifference, that is at the heart of this wonderful novel. Garcia Marquez’s story of a love that flowers only in old age is achingly beautiful, comic and timeless.