Following his death in 2014, rumors swirled among readers and scholars that several never-before-seen works by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez existed. Some speculated they were held by family and others thought maybe they existed somewhere in the author’s vast archives at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center.
Fans no longer need to speculate: there is a new novel from the beloved writer hitting shelves across Latin America in 2024. Penguin Random House confirmed that En Agosto Nos Vemos–We’ll See Each Other in August–is real.
Even before the author died, many believed that another book was in the works by the author. In 1999, he published a short story for the Colombian magazine Cambio which many believed to be the first chapter of a much longer work–that same year he took ownership of that very magazine. The story follows a middle age woman named Ana Magdalena Bach who visits a tropical island to lie flowers on her mother’s grave. Wile there, she finds herself in a whirlwind romance.
For years, García Márquez’s children felt uncomfortable with publishing an unfinished work by their father. But in a recent press release, they explained why they changed their minds.
“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.
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The 150 page book will have five sections, all of which follow heroine Ana Magdalena Bach. No information about an English edition of the book is available yet, but given that García Márquez is the most translated Spanish-language writer in the world and has a tremendous fanbase, chances are it won’t take too long for a translation to be official.
More information about the book and García Márquez’s legacy can be found here.
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