The late Gabriel García Márquez’s family have decided to publish his manuscript left unfinished due to his passing in 2014. The Novel Prize Winner best known for his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) will finally reach shelves again ten years later.
His two sons, Rodrigo and Gonsalo García Barcha, said the unfinished manuscript ‘was the fruit of a final effort to continue creating against all odds.’ The widely read Latin American author has now surpassed Cervantes as the most translated writer from Spanish.
With increased interest in his work over the last few years, his family agreed that his unfinished manuscript would be welcomingly accepted by an eager public and would pay ode to his creative impulse that continued until he lost his battle with pneumonia at 87.
The title of the novel has been revealed as En Agosto Nos Vemos, which translates into English as ‘See You Again in August’. The novel is to be roughly 150 pages with five stand-alone stories that centre around the protagonist Ana Magdelena Bach.
However, Ana Magdelena will be no stranger to Márquez fans. Maárquez mentioned Ana in a 1999 talk in Madrid where he read a fragment of one of the five stories and she was met with great enthusiasm. She also features in a version of one of the stories published in 2013 for El País which can be read in their newspaper archive.
The five short stories which form the novel, are to be published under Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House Spain, Márquez’s usual publisher, in hardback, e-book and audio. It is to be published in all Spanish-speaking countries apart from Mexico sometime in 2024.
There is no date for an English translation at the moment.
Words by Georgia McInnes