What was the name of the unfinished novel by Hemingway published posthumously in 1986?

The unfinished Hemingway novel published posthumously in 1986 was The Garden of Eden.

Hemingway began writing the novel in 1946 and continued working on it for roughly 15 years. The story follows David Bourne, an American writer, and his wife Catherine during travels through the French Riviera, the Camargue, and Spain. Its themes include marriage, artistic identity, sexual transgression, and shifting gender roles.

The published book was assembled from multiple drafts and was heavily abridged. Hemingway had produced hundreds of thousands of words across the surviving material, but Scribner’s selected and edited a much shorter version for publication. That editorial history made the novel controversial, since readers and scholars questioned how closely the released text represented Hemingway’s intentions.

The title can cause confusion because Islands in the Stream was also published after Hemingway’s death, in 1970. However, Islands in the Stream is a different posthumous novel, while The Garden of Eden is the unfinished work associated with the 1986 publication.