As The Guardian reports, an entire literary masterpiece by Gabriel García Márquez is actually “lying in a dusty safe held by the late author’s family or under lock and key at his archive at the University of Texas.”
In late April 2023, Penguin Random House confirmed that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel – titled En Agosto Nos Vemos (We’ll See Each Other in August) – not only exists but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024.
The British daily explains that speculation has surrounded the unpublished title ever since 1999 when García Márquez published a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio.
The tale of 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, was allegedly the first chapter Márquez was working on.
But after the internationally acclaimed author affectionately known as Gabo died in 2014, it was believed the work would remain unseen as his family was thought to be uncomfortable publishing an unfinished work.
In a statement, García Márquez’s children Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha said that they deemed the work too precious to be hidden away from Colombia and the wider world, which has been heavily influenced by Márquez’s critically acclaimed tales of magical realism.