Will an unpublished work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez be released?

An editorial director for Penguin Random House Mexico has revealed that there is a previously unreleased manuscript written by recently deceased author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Penguin Random House Mexico editorial director Cristobal Pera told the Associated Press that Garcia Marquez’s family is still deciding whether the manuscript will be published and, if so, by what publisher. According to the AP, Garcia Marquez had decided not to release it.

An excerpt of the manuscript, which reportedly is titled “We’ll See Each Other in August,” was released in the Spanish La Vanguardia newspaper. The section appeared to be an opening chapter and follows a woman who takes an annual trip to a tropical island to see her mother’s grave.

Gerald Martin, a biographer of Garcia Marquez, said he had known of the story but thought it took a different form. 

“This has come as a surprise to me,” he told the AP. “The last time I talked to Gabo about this story it was a stand-alone which he was going to include in a book with three similar but independent stories. Now they're talking about a series of episodes in which the woman turns up and has a different adventure each year. Obviously it makes sense and presumably Gabo really did play with it, presumably some years ago.”

In 2012, Garcia Marquez’s brother announced that the author was diagnosed with dementia and would probably not write again. AP writer Paul Haven said it appears the “August” manuscript was probably written around the time Garcia Marquez worked on his novel “Memories of my Melancholy Whores,” which was released in 2004. 

Garcia Marquez died on April 17 and is the author of such works as “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “A Hundred Years of Solitude,” among others. His works sold more copies than anything else in the Spanish language other than the Bible, according to the AP. Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982.