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March 2024 is publication date for Márquez’s 'lost' novel, Until August
Viking will publish Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez’s ’lost’ novel, Until August, on 12th March 2024. It will be translated by Anne McLean.
The finalised book title, cover design, cover copy and English language publication date were revealed for the first time at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday 18th October. Viking announced in May it had acquired the unpublished novel, En Agosto Nos Vemos, loosely translated at the time as We’ll See Each Other Again in August. Isabel Wall, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in an exclusive submission from the Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells in Barcelona.
The publication, 10 years after Márquez’s death, is being billed as a “landmark literary event” and a global collaboration between publishers, including Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House US and Random House in Spain.
Penguin Random House UK will re-issue 16 titles from Márquez’s backlist over the course of 2024, beginning with six titles on 1st February: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera; No One Writes to the Colonel; Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Of Love and Other Demons; and Collected Stories.
Viking said of the unpublished work: "Towards the end of his life, [Márquez] was adding the finishing touches to a new novel – while simultaneously battling dementia. As his final days approached, and with his memory tragically failing, he decided that this new work, despite receiving his final sign off, should not be published after his death."
After his death in April 2014, Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, respected their father’s wishes, and the finished manuscript was locked away with his other papers in an archive at the University of Texas. However the family later “reconsidered the book’s exceptional qualities, and how much of their father’s genius and colour and love lived within its words”, Viking said. “After long deliberation they made the decision the novel should finally be shared with his millions of devoted readers around the world.”
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 10 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 is described as “an extraordinary and profound tale of female freedom and desire”. It follows a woman, named Ana Magdalena Bach, visiting an island each year on the anniversary of her mother’s death, there exploring freedom, regret, and the mysteries of love.
