Until August – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The year 2024 promises to be the year of a rich harvest of books. The breakout of Covid, leading to a pandemic and subsequent lockdown; the rise of intolerance (when one thought just what it would not be due to the death scare) have surely resulted in outpourings that are being bound within pages. The personal and increasingly, the women and other genders (not necessarily, of the heterogeneous males) will be heard more and maybe men will write more in the “voice” of what Simon de Beauvoir called the second sex.

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Therefore, it is exciting to report and also look forward to two books, among several others surely, on our times.

The year 2024 will mark Marquez’s tenth death anniversary. He was suffering from bouts of dementia before he died but he did write that one last book even while experiencing it. Until August, the novel, which he did not want to publish, for believing that it did not meet the same standard as his previous works. But his sons have announced that the book will indeed be published in March 2024.

One Hundred Years of Solitude made Gabriel Garcia Marquez a name in literary history. There are other books and short stories by him as well, which are fun to roll off the tongue, in English. Love in the time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Colonel in his Labyrinth, Autumn of the Patriarch, among others.

Márquez was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1982, and though he worked as a journalist, he remains one of the best-known Latin American writers in history. The defining book One Hundred Years of Solitude was indeed his masterpiece of magic realism, but fans always pick a favourite if given a chance. So it comes as good news that this March, we will have another work from the master storyteller.

The story is about a woman who is 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 to the Caribbean and for one night, takes a new lover. The book is described as “joyously sensual” because it is a “profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love”.

Salman Rushdie – Knife: Mediations after an Attempted Murder

In other news, Salman Rushdie, whose latest book was Victory City, published last year, was framed as a fictional translation of an epic, originally written in Sanskrit. It talked about religious bigotry. Earlier, on 12 August, the Booker Prize winner survived a stabbing in which he lost sight in one eye. He lost the use of one of his hands, which is gradually healing. While he’s best known for his magical realism, Rushdie draws on his own experience recovering from the traumatic attack in his latest book – Knife: Mediations after an Attempted Murder.

In several interviews he has described writing the book as part of his healing process—“a way of kind of taking charge of it”—and not letting the incident control him. ‘Knife’ is a powerful, deeply personal, and ultimately uplifting meditation on life, loss, love, the power of art, finding the strength to keep going – and to stand up again.

The book will be out in April 2024 and is billed to be gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

The writer is an author and a senior journalist.