Until August

A Novel

Translated by Anne McLean
$12.99 US
Knopf
On sale Mar 12, 2024 | 9780593802007
Sales rights: US Only
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The extraordinary rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude—a moving tale of female desire and abandon
 
Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart.

Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love—an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.
“Contains enough tenderness and beauty to recommend it to García Márquez’s many fans.” Wall Street Journal

“Far more than a coda to a magnificent career . . . Anne McLean’s marvelous rendering of García Márquez’s posthumous Until August continues the tradition, immersing us in the dreamy richness of the author’s fictional worlds, amid characters pummeled by the demands of marriage, family and the dead . . . McLean’s nuanced translation harkens back to the maestro’s canonical novels while evoking, in a composition as tight as a Rembrandt portrait, the ache of human need.” Minneapolis Star Tribune

“García Márquez should be read because he is so influential a writer, one who remodelled his country’s perception of itself and reshaped its literature and that of the wider world . . . Yet more than this, unlike so many other ‘great writers,’ his books are enjoyable. Inventive storytelling comes with indelible characters and arresting images served up with episodes of sharp psychological acuity . . . Love—ecstatic, forbidden, transgressive and especially between older people—is one of his great subjects . . . Until August is inventively enjoyable and working to its surprising, pleasing ending. I read it straight through in one sitting, then got up the next day and did it again.” The Times (London)

About

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The extraordinary rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude—a moving tale of female desire and abandon
 
Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart.

Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love—an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.

Praise

“Contains enough tenderness and beauty to recommend it to García Márquez’s many fans.” Wall Street Journal

“Far more than a coda to a magnificent career . . . Anne McLean’s marvelous rendering of García Márquez’s posthumous Until August continues the tradition, immersing us in the dreamy richness of the author’s fictional worlds, amid characters pummeled by the demands of marriage, family and the dead . . . McLean’s nuanced translation harkens back to the maestro’s canonical novels while evoking, in a composition as tight as a Rembrandt portrait, the ache of human need.” Minneapolis Star Tribune

“García Márquez should be read because he is so influential a writer, one who remodelled his country’s perception of itself and reshaped its literature and that of the wider world . . . Yet more than this, unlike so many other ‘great writers,’ his books are enjoyable. Inventive storytelling comes with indelible characters and arresting images served up with episodes of sharp psychological acuity . . . Love—ecstatic, forbidden, transgressive and especially between older people—is one of his great subjects . . . Until August is inventively enjoyable and working to its surprising, pleasing ending. I read it straight through in one sitting, then got up the next day and did it again.” The Times (London)