'An act of betrayal': García Márquez's sons publish last novel in defiance of his final wish

A novel written by the Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez in the last years of his life has been published against his instruction that it be destroyed.

- Alex Clark

Until August, written when the author was suffering from dementia, comes a decade after his death and was published on Wednesday, which would have been his 97th birthday. It has been described by his sons as "the fruits of one last effort to carry on creating against all odds", and tells the story of a woman who makes a yearly pilgrimage to her mother's grave on a Caribbean island, a trip that becomes dominated by a series of chance sexual encounters.

In the face of increasing memory loss, García Márquez - known universally as Gabo - lost confidence in the work and asked for its destruction.

Until now, the manuscript has been available to scholars at the writer's archive in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, but recently the author's sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, made the decision to publish it, judging it to be far better than their father believed. "In an act of betrayal," they write in their introduction to the novel, "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."