> Zed Book Club / Better Late Than Never: Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Unpublished Novel Set for Release in 2024
Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his office at home, Mexico, 1983. Photo: Ben Martin/Getty Images
> Buzz
Better Late Than Never: Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Unpublished Novel Set for Release in 2024
'En Agosto Nos Vemos' or 'We'll See Each Other in August' was deemed by the late author's family to be too important to stay hidden / BY Kisha Ferguson / May 9th, 2023
After years of rumours, the unpublished novel by the man who was once described as ‘the voice of Latin American’ is finally making its way into print. According to The Guardian, the 150-page novel is centred around a character named 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.”
Márquez’s family said they initially felt uncomfortable publishing the unfinished manuscript, but that his two sons — Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha — changed their minds after reading it.
“We’ll See Each Other in August was the result of a last effort to continue creating against the wind and tide. 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 enjoying the most outstanding 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 misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work,” they said in a press release.
Best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Colombian-born Márquez developed a literary style which came to be known as magic realism. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.”
Penguin Random House imprint Viking, will publish We’ll See Each Other in August in hardcover, e-book and audio formats across Latin America in 2024. There’s still no work on an English edition.