Today's (contemporary) classic is Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez.
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márquez has created a vividly absorbing fictional world, as lush and dazzling as a dream and as real and immediate as our own deepest longings.
If you've already read it, take a quiz to test your memory.
Here's Oprah's guide to Love in the Time of Cholera.
Have you read this classic? Did you read along when Oprah picked it for her book club?