The original Spanish title of the book means "Twelve Pilgrim Stories." That's exactly what the book is—a collection of twelve short stories. These are the summaries of each short story.
In "Bon Voyage, Mr. President," a Latin American president travels to Switzerland in search of a medical diagnosis that can explain his abdominal and groin pains. The issue is spinal, and the treatment is risky and costly. But the ambulance driver, Homero, decides to help the Mr. President instead of extorting him as he originally planned to do, and although the operation doesn't fix the pain, Mr. President can now return and pursue political reform in his own country.
In "The Saint," Margarito Duarte travels to Rome from his native Colombia to obtain Sainte status from the Pope for his deceased daughter. Duarte's friends and family believe his daughter really is a saint because when her body is pulled from the grave for a construction project, her body is weightless, but still intact. Twenty years later, the narrator reconnects with Duarte and learns that he is still waiting for his daughter to be canonized by the Vatican, but the narrator decides Duarte himself is the real saint.
"The Airplane of the Sleeping Beauty" remembers García Márquez's story of falling in love with a woman in the Paris airport. The woman in question is also García's seat mate on his flight.
"I Sell My Dreams" tells of a strange woman who sells her dreams to travelers. In the story, the narrator's breakfast is interrupted by a violent wave from the ocean that was so powerful, it carried away cars. He finds that one of the casualties was a woman he'd met years before in Vienna, the dream seller. She helped him to escape some sort of tragedy and also helped him to cross paths with the great Pablo Neruda.
"I Only Came to Use the Phone" tells the story of a hitchhiker who ends up on a bus heading to a mental institute where is mistakenly admitted as a patient. She calls her husband, but he assumes she left him for another man. In order to communicate with her husband that she is trapped, she must betray him by sleeping with a guard, but when the husband arrives to save her, the doctors convince him that she's genuinely insane, and he abandons her again.
"The Ghosts of August" tells of a family in Tuscany staying at a castle where a strange ghost story is told about the builder. When they wake up from their night's sleep, they awake in the murderer's bedchamber, and there is fresh blood and the smell of strawberries in the air.
"María dos Prazeres" is the story about a woman of the same name who dreams that she will die at the age of 76. She picks her burial place, a cemetery called Montjuich, and she trains her dog Noi to visit that cemetery, so that someone will mourner her. She is an anarchist against the Franco Regime, and the story ends with her realization that the dream's interpretation was not correct.
"Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen." An elderly woman travels to see the pope, but only sees death everywhere she looks.
"Tramontana," tells of a narrator whose family is on vacation when the terrible wind storm called Tramontana comes upon them. The story is of their finding shelter and enduring the terrible Catalan storm.
"Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness." Miss Forbes is a German nanny who arrives just in time to ruin two young boys' summer fun. She makes them eat food they hate and forbids them from playing. The boys decide to kill her by poisoning her, but when they arrive back to the house after a long fun day of play, they find a full blown police investigation. Miss Forbes survived the poisoning but was then brutally murdered by an unknown assailant.
"Light is Like Water," tells the story of two young boys whose parents buy them a rowboat. They break lightbulbs and discover that light pours out like water, and when they invite their friends to go out sailing with them, the friends drown in the light.
"The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow" tells the story of Billy Sanchez and Nena Daconte who are newlyweds abroad in Europe for their honeymoon. Nena is two months pregnant, and when she gets herself cut by a rose thorn, the wound won't stop bleeding, so they take her to the hospital, but the French hospital removes the newlyweds and Billy spends much time hoping to reunite to Nena and to find out if she's okay, but it turns out that unbeknownst to him, she died a few days into her stay, and her parents have already flown her body back home and buried her. Billy decides to take violent revenge for his mistreatment.
