Garcia Marquez's Final Manuscript Released

"Until August," the final book by the Nobel prize winning giant of Latin American "magical realism," Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is being released in its original Spanish as "En agosto nos vemos" on March 6, and in English later this month.

Fifteen years before his 2014 death, the affectionately nicknamed "Gabo" began writing the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle aged woman who visits her mother's grave every August on a Caribbean island, taking advantage of the trips to leave aside her family life and have erotic trysts with strangers.

In 1999 he read the first chapter publicly but, unsatisfied with the rest of the work, he declined to publish it. Instead, he handed versions of the manuscript over to his relatives.

The author, who earned international renown for novels like "Love in the Time of Cholera," considered his last book a "mess" to be discarded, sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha said in an online press event from Spain.

The book "became an indecipherable little thing" in the final years of his life, which were marked by illness and memory loss.

But close relatives decided to keep the manuscript and other fragments of "Until August" at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive and library at the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States.

According to Gonzalo Garcia, academics who read parts of the work convinced the brothers to unify them into a book, to be released on what would have been their father's 97th birthday.

"When we read the versions again we realized that the book was much better than we remembered," Gonzalo Garcia said.

The book's Spanish version is being released, while the English version hits bookstores on March 20.

Garcia Marquez, who died in Mexico City, is considered one of the world's most revered authors, the main engine in a major Latin American literary wave that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.