Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez An oddly disturbing book. On finishing it I at first thought, 'What an odd book!' and in it's way it is, but it leaves something behind that makes you keep rethinking it. We are told from the beginning that Santiago Nasir is going to be killed and from then on are given a 27 year old account of what took place the morning of his death, when all the town but Santiago knew he was going to die. It is the morning after a wedding at which he has been a guest and unknown to Santiago the bride has been returned to her parents as she was not a virgin bride. Humiliated, the mother beats her daughter to get the name of the 'perpetrator', she gives the name Santiago Nasir. The only thing to do in the eyes of her twin brothers is to kill the man who took their sister's honour. Within hours the entire town know that today is the day the Santiago will die but due to mishaps and misunderstandings no one actually prevents the killing. It is more than likely that the twins, in telling everyone their plans, hoped to be stopped and when that didn't happen, carried out their plan because by then things had gone too far. It's a beguiling tale of inevitability, of people trusting that someone else would stop the killing, trusting perhaps that it wouldn't happen, no one quite believing. We are told that Santiago is innocent but never who the real perpetrator is or why Angela, the bride would lie. That is left for the reader to question along with the narrator of the book who all these years later is still trying to work out what happened on that fateful day. This was a quick and easy read, page turning because despite knowing the outcome I was eager to learn how it came about even if that did leave me feeling a little bewildered after reading and questioning why Angela would lie.