Gabriel García Márquez’s lost novel to be published with sons’ blessings 10 years after author’s death

A lost novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez will hit bookshelves in 2024, a decade after the author’s death.

The legendary Colombian writer, best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, died in 2014 from pneumonia, aged 87. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest authors of the 20th century.

Towards the end of his life, García Márquez was working on a new novel while simultaneously struggling with dementia. In his final days and with his memory failing, he decided that this new work should not be published after his death, despite receiving his final sign off.

Now, 10 years after his death, Márquez’s sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha have decided that the book should be released.

Titled Until August, it has been described as “an extraordinary and profound tale of female freedom and desire”. It will be published in English by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, on 12 March 2024.

The book has been locked away with his other papers in an archive at the University of Texas for 10 years. Very few knew of its existence, and those who did believed it would never be released to the public.

Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha said: “Until August was the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds.

“Reading it once again almost ten years after his death, we discovered that the text had many highly enjoyable merits and nothing that prevents us from delighting in the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, his poetic language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind and his affection for our experiences and misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work.”

Until August follows a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who visits an island each year on the anniversary of her mother’s death. There, she is able to explore freedom, regret, and the mysteries of love.

García Márquez was best known for popularising the magical realism style of writing, and was affectionately known as “Gabo” to his fans across the Spanish-speaking world and beyond.

Marquez was awarded 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”.

Upon his death in 2014, Colombia’s then-president Juan Manuel Santos referred to García Márquez as “the greatest Colombian who ever lived”.