In these conversations Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, speaks about his Colombian family background, his early travels and struggles as writer, his literary antecedents, and his personal artistic concerns. Marquez conveys, as he does in his work through the power of language, the heat and colour of the Spanish Caribbean, the mythological world of its inhabitants, and the exotic mentality of its leaders.

Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the journalist and novelist who shares these conversations, is a friend and contemporary of Marques, and also of Colombian extraction.