A previously unpublished novel by Colombian literary legend Gabriel García Márquez is set for release next year, the Spanish newspaper El País reports.
Penguin Random House will publish García Márquez’s En agosto nos vemos next Spring. The novel will be released in Spain and Central and South America; there’s no word yet as to when an English translation of the book might be available.
The manuscript for the novel, the title of which can be translated as See You in August or We’ll See Each Other in August, has been stored at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive at the University of Texas in Austin which is home to García Márquez’s papers.
The novel tells the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman who visits her mother’s grave each year and relates her sexual escapades to her. It is composed of five short stories, one of which El País published in 2003.
García Márquez, who died in 2014, is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The author of such classic novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
The Guardian reports that two of García Márquez’s children, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, called En agosto nos vemos “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.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
