Rumours had long circulated that an entire literary masterpiece, never seen by the public, could still be lying in a dusty safe held by the late author’s family or under lock and key at his archive at the University of Texas.

Axar.az reports citing foreign media that on Friday Penguin Random House confirmed that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel – titled En Agosto Nos Vemos, (We’ll See Each Other in August) – not only exists, but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024.

“No?! A Gabriel García Márquez book?” said Juan Moreno Blanco, a professor at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, who was lost for words at the news. “I had heard rumours of some manuscripts, but nothing more than rumours. An entire book?!”

Speculation has surrounded the unpublished title ever since 1999 when García Márquez published a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio.

The tale of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has an erotic affair while visiting a tropical island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave, was allegedly the first chapter Márquez was working on.

But after the internationally acclaimed author affectionately known as Gabo died in 2014, it was believed the work would remain unseen as his family was thought to be uncomfortable publishing an unfinished work.

“Until now the position of the two children was that it would not be published,” said Jaime Abello, director of the Gabo Foundation. “It seems they changed their mind after reading the manuscript!”