May 23, 2023, 12:51pm
Alfred A. Knopf will publish Until August, the final (as far as we know) novel written by Nobel Prize–winning writer Gabriel García Márquez before his death in 2014, next year.
After years of rumors that there was an “an entire literary masterpiece, never seen by the public” locked away, Arc of the Covenant-style, inside the bowels of the writer’s archive at the University of Texas, it was confirmed last month by Penguin Random House that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel not only exists, but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024.
We can now add the shelves of North America (and most of the rest of the world) to that publication window, as Reagan Arthur, Knopf executive v-p and publisher, has acquired North American rights from the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency in Barcelona. The book will be translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and published by Knopf as part of a simultaneous global release in 2024.
García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, said of the novel:
“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.”
Among the few details made public so far are that the book will contain five separate sections centered around 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, and will number about 150 pages in total.
[h/t Publishers Weekly]