"It was heartening, then, to read the next day of the new Gabriel García Márquez novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which has just gone on sale in the Hispanophone world. García Márquez is 76 and unwell, but his book seems to be about sex,love and age, not age, death and funerals. Its principal character is a retired journalist, just turning 90, who decides to mark his birthday by sleeping with a 14-year old virgin prostitute (the book is set in Colombia in the 1950s, putting plenty of cultural distance between us and the uncomfortable morality of that time and place)."