Issuu

about the translator

Anne McLean studied history in London, Ontario, and literary translation in London, England, and now lives in Toronto, where she translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Julio Cortázar, Javier Cercas, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Héctor Abad. Her translation of The Scandal of the Century by Gabriel García Márquez was published by Knopf in 2019.

also bY GabrIel GarCÍa MÁrQueZ

No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968)

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976)

Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1978)

In Evil Hour (1979)

Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1979)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982)

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1986)

Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín (1987)

Love in the Time of Cholera (1988)

The General in His Labyrinth (1990)

Strange Pilgrims (1993)

Of Love and Other Demons (1995)

News of a Kidnapping (1997)

Living to Tell the Tale (2003)

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005)

The Scandal of the Century (2019)

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

UNTIL AUGUST

Translated from the Spanish by Anne

McLean

Edited

by Cristóbal

Pera

alFreD a. KnoPF

New York | Toronto | 2024 PENGUIN BOOK S

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Penguin Random House UK , One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London sW11 7bW penguin.co.uk

First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto 2024

First published in Great Britain by Viking 2024

Published in Penguin Books 2025 001

Photographic reproductions from the original manuscript courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

The moral right of the author has been asserted

This is a work of ﬁction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used ﬁctitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture. Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artiﬁcial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D 02 Yh 68

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Isbn : 978–1–405–96427–2

Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certiﬁed paper.

eDItor’s note to the sPanIsh eDItIon

the orIGInal ManusCrIPt

The MeMorY loss our Father suffereD In his final years, as most people will find easy to imagine, was extremely tough on all of us. But in particular, the way that loss diminished his ability to continue to write with his customary rigor was a source of desperate frustration for him. He told us once with the clarity and eloquence of the great writer he was: “Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.”

Until August was the fruit of one last eﬀort to carry on creating against all odds. The process

was a race between his artistic perfectionism and his vanishing mental faculties. The lengthy back-and-forth of the many versions of the text is described in detail, much better than we could, by our friend Cristóbal Pera in his editor’s note for the Spanish edition. At the time, all we knew was Gabo’s ﬁnal judgment: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”

We did not destroy it, but we did set it aside, in the hope that time would decide what to do with it. Reading it again almost ten years after his death, we discovered that the text contained a great many wonderful achievements. It is not, of course, as polished as his greatest books. It has a few rough patches and contradictions, but nothing that impedes enjoyment of the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, his poetic use of language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind, and his aﬀection for our experiences and misadventures, especially when it comes to love. Love, possibly the main subject of his entire oeuvre.

Judging the book to be much better than we remembered it, another possibility occurred to us: that the fading faculties that kept him from ﬁnishing the book also kept him from realizing how good it was. In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us. In that we trust.

—Rodrigo & Gonzalo García Barcha

UNTIL AUGUST

She returned to the island on friday, August 16, on the three o’clock ferry. She was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, plain ﬂat shoes without socks, carrying a satin parasol and a handbag, and her only luggage was a beach bag. In the row of taxis at the dock she went straight to an old model corroded by the sea air. The driver welcomed her warmly and took her jolting across the destitute village, with its mudwalled shacks, palm-thatch roofs, and streets of burning sand beside a sea in ﬂames. He had to swerve around undaunted pigs and naked chil-