Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is a brilliantly crafted, beautifully written story of love and the love-sick. Spurned as a young man, Florentino Ariza has a half century of waiting to fill before a chance to redeclare his love for Fermina Daze comes, when her husband is killed retrieving a parrot from a mango tree. Funny, poignant and heartfelt - enduring and unrequited love have rarely been more movingly expressed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera