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An unpublished novel by Gabriel García Márquez is set to be published next year
An unpublished novel by the late literary giant Gabriel García Márquez will arrive on bookstore shelves next year.
Rumours had long circulated that an entire literary masterpiece, never seen by the public, could still be lying in a dusty safe held by the late author’s family or under lock and key at his archive at the University of Texas. Penguin Random House confirmed that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel – titled En Agosto Nos Vemos, (We’ll See Each Other in August) – not only exists, but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024. Speculation has surrounded the unpublished title ever since 1999 when García Márquez published a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio.
The tale of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has an erotic affair while visiting a tropical island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave, was allegedly the first chapter Márquez was working on.
But after the internationally acclaimed author affectionately known as Gabo died in 2014, it was believed the work would remain unseen as his family was thought to be uncomfortable publishing an unfinished work. The Colombian author behind One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera died in 2014, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript.
At the time, García Márquez’s family hadn’t decided whether to publish the novel posthumously. But now his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, have concluded that the book should be read by an eager public. En Agosto Nos Vemos “was the fruit of a final effort to continue creating against all odds,” they said.
“Reading it once again almost 10 years after his death, we discovered that the text had many and very enjoyable merits and nothing to prevent us from enjoying the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, the poetry of language, the captivating narrative, his understanding of the human being and his affection for his experiences and misfortunes, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work,” they added, using a common nickname for García Márquez. Among the few details made public are that the book will contain five separate sections centred around Ana Magdalena and will number about 150 pages in total. An English edition has not yet been announced.
Gabo is the most translated Spanish-language writer in the world and his literary legacy has inspired works from Midnight’s Children to Disney’s Encanto.
His best known novel, 100 Years of Solitude, told the history of the Buendías, a family in the fictional town of Macondo, and is regarded as one of the most influential works in the Spanish language canon.
García Márquez had the ability to vividly capture the immense beauty of Colombia in his work while at the same time illustrating its tragic, bloody history of cyclical conflict. Though the unexpected announcement has sparked excitement it has also generated critical discussion over whether the unfinished work should be published posthumously.
