Description
Towards the end of his life, Gabriel García 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and with his memory tragically failing, he decided that this new work, despite receiving his final sign off, should not be published after his death.
When that time came, 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. It remained there for the next ten years, and those few who knew of the book’s existence thought this final novel would never see the light of day.
But after the passing of time and grief, the family reconsidered the book’s exceptional qualities, and how much of their father’s genius and colour and love lived within its words. 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 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 is 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. Written in Gabriel García Márquez’s inimitable style – both sultry and sensual – it is another incredible work by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
