Gabo fans rejoice! Gabriel García Márquez’s unpublished novel to be released in 2024

Publisher Penguin Random House confirms that the Colombian legend’s unpublished work, En Agosto Nos Vemos, will be released next year.

Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in September 2008. The Nobel Prize winner died on April 17, 2014. | Photo Credit: TOMAS BRAVO / REUTERS / File Photo

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian author of the acclaimed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, will soon release an unpublished work entitled En Agosto Nos Vemos (We’ll See Each Other in August), says a report by The Guardian. Rumours of an unseen masterpiece by the late author have circulated for years, leading fans to speculate whether it was still locked away in a safe or at his archive at the University of Texas. On April 28, Penguin Random House confirmed that the novel exists and will be available on bookshelves across Latin America in 2024.

The unpublished work is said to be the first chapter García Márquez was working on in 1999: a short story about Anna Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has an erotic affair while visiting a tropical island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave. After the author’s death in 2014, it was believed that the work would remain unseen as his family was uncomfortable publishing an unfinished piece. However, García Márquez’s children Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha have decided to release the work, deeming it too precious to be hidden away from Colombia and the wider world.

En Agosto Nos Vemos consists of five separate sections centred around Anna Magdalena and will be approximately 150 pages long. While an English edition has not yet been announced, the work has already generated excitement among fans of the author, who are eagerly awaiting its release.

García Márquez’s legacy continues to inspire works from Midnight’s Children to Disney’s Encanto. His ability to capture the beauty of Colombia while illustrating its tragic, bloody history of cyclical conflict has earned him a unique place in the Spanish language canon. According to Ariel Castillo, a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla and a leading expert in García Márquez’s work, he has influenced the entire world.

The announcement of the unpublished work has sparked both excitement and critical discussion about whether an unfinished work should be published posthumously. However, for the critically acclaimed Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the pleasure of enjoying an unfinished work by a great artist is reason enough to celebrate.