A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mercedes Barcha

The Nobel-winning author of the celebrated One Hundred Years of Solitude and his wife, Mercedes, are memorialized in this heartfelt debut written by their son. Garcia recounts Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s last days in 2014 as he fought cancer and dementia in his Mexico City home with Mercedes, his “last tether,” beside him. Even as his father’s ability to recognize family members and prodigious mental faculties faded—while crowds of admirers and journalists surrounded the house—he spoke “with a deliberateness that makes you forget... that he is years deep into dementia.” Throughout, flashes of Garcia Marquez’s personality and earthy sense of humor pierce through (“Everyone treats me like I’m a child,” he remarks one day. “It’s good that I like it”). Garcia’s limpid prose gazes calmly at death, registering pain but not being overcome by it, as he documents his mother’s matter-of-fact pragmatism and the deep emotion hidden beneath it: “She looks my father up and down with detachment as if he were her patient... she is unfathomable. Then a brief convulsion overcomes her, and she erupts into tears.” The result is a moving eulogy that will captivate fans of the literary lion. Agent: Maribel Luque, Agencia Balcells. (July)