Gabriel Garcia Marquez left behind unpublished erotic story, editor says

Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez left behind an unpublished manuscript that he chose not to print while he was alive, an editor has revealed.

Cristobal Pera, editorial director of Penguin Random House Mexico, said his family had not yet decided whether to allow the work to come out posthumously, or which publishing house would get the rights. Garcia Marquez died at his Mexico City home on April 17.

An excerpt of the manuscript - which has a working title of We'll See Each Other In August ( En Agosto Nos Vemos) was published in Spain's La Vanguardia newspaper. It contained what appeared to be an opening chapter, describing a trip taken by a 50-ish married woman who visits her mother's grave on a tropical island every year. In the chapter, she has an affair with a man of about the same age at the hotel where she stays.

The erotic tone of the work is heightened by the island's tropical charm, with deftly drawn touches of the heat, the landscape, music and local inhabitants.

The manuscript apparently dates to about the time Garcia Marquez was writing his last novel, Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, which was published in 2004, and deals with similar themes of forms of love. Garcia Marquez, beset by a failing memory, apparently did not write much in recent years.

"I'm not going to write any more," Mexican writer Homero Aridjis recalls Garcia Marquez telling him in 2005.

His biographer Gerald Martin said the manuscript apparently started as a short story.