Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s family consider publishing final novel

THE family of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Nobel literature laureate, may publish a posthumous novel.

In Aracataca, the Colombian town where Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born, a man reads about

THE family of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Nobel literature laureate, may publish a posthumous novel.

Garcia Marquez, the master of magical realism who brought Latin American literature to a worldwide audience, died aged 87 at his home in Mexico City on Thursday, with his wife, Mercedes, and two sons at his side. His family is considering publishing a novel entitled We will Meet in August.

It was thought to have been finished but Garcia Marquez then decided to tinker with the ending, according to friends.

The novel is about a woman, Maria Magdalena, who is 53 and every August 16 travels to a Caribbean island where her mother is buried. Though she has been happily married for years, she has an affair during one such trip and hopes that something will happen on this day every year.

In 2008, the Colombian journalist Jose Salgar said Garcia Marquez had written a new book, the first since his last finished novel was published in 2004, while last year Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, a friend of Garcia Marquez, said there were two versions of this unpublished text.

Guillem d'Efak, director of Garcia Marquez's literary agents, Carmen Balcells, declined to comment on the possibility of a new book: “We are desolated by his death.”

Garcia Marquez's masterpiece was One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dream-like, dynastic epic that sold more than 50 million copies and was translated into 25 languages. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

The cause of his death was not known, but he was treated for pneumonia this year.

On Friday, the Colombian government declared three days of national mourning.