See you in August

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) is a Colombian journalist, publisher and political figure, one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century. The founder of the literary movement “magical realism”. In the early 1960s, Márquez moved from Colombia to Mexico, and in 1981 he asked for political asylum. In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: “for novels and short stories in which fantasy and reality, combining, reflect the life and conflicts of this continent”.

The novel “See you in August”, on which Gabriel García Márquez worked in the last years of his life, was first published 10 years after the author’s death — in March 2024, on the 97th anniversary of his birth. This is the writer’s first and only novel, the central character of which is a woman. Ana Magdalena Bach, it would seem, has been happily married to her husband for 27 years. Despite this, every year in August she goes to the island where her mother is buried. And each time she makes a new lover there for one night, becoming a completely different person, but torn between the search for freedom and a sense of guilt. When deciding to publish this work, García Márquez's sons noted that it has many advantages. And nothing can prevent "enjoying the most outstanding features of Gabo's prose: the unrestrained imagination, the poetic nature of the language, the captivating narrative, the deep understanding of people and sympathy for their experiences and misfortunes, especially in love, which is perhaps the main theme of all his work."