Paul Auster

Three interconnected novellas — City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room — in which Paul Auster dismantles the detective genre to explore identity, surveillance, authorship, and the unreliability of language, all set in a New York that is both hyper-real and increasingly abstract.

Marco Stanley Fogg arrives at Columbia University in 1965 as an orphan with a modest inheritance, spends it all on books, comes close to starvation, and is gradually drawn into a series of coincidences that reveal his family history across two more generations of lost and wandering American men.

Paul Auster's first major work in two parts: A Portrait of an Invisible Man, written after his father's sudden death, an attempt to understand a man he never truly knew; and The Book of Memory, an autobiographical meditation on solitude, fatherhood, memory, and the act of writing.

Jim Nashe, a former firefighter driving aimlessly through America with his inheritance, picks up a young gambler named Pozzi — and after losing everything in a card game against two eccentric millionaires, they find themselves building a medieval wall in a Pennsylvania field to pay off their debt.

Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey — and Auster follows four parallel versions of his life, diverging from the same starting point based on small accidents of circumstance, through the turbulent American 1960s and into the early 1970s.

Peter Aaron narrates the story of his friend and fellow writer Benjamin Sachs, who died in an explosion while detonating a replica of the Statue of Liberty — and gradually reconstructs, from memory and from investigation, how a man of political ideals became a bomber.

David Zimmer loses his wife and sons in a plane crash and, through grief, becomes obsessed with the silent films of Hector Mann, a forgotten comedian from the 1920s — until a letter arrives claiming that Mann is still alive.

Sy Baumgartner, a 71-year-old philosophy professor, has spent nine years living in the aftermath of his wife Anna's death in a swimming accident — still surrounded by her manuscripts, her presence in every corner of the house, and the ongoing conversation with her that he cannot stop having.

Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman who has moved to Brooklyn to die in peace, gradually finds himself drawn back into life through his nephew Tom, a failed academic working in a bookshop, and a series of warm, eccentric characters who make Brooklyn feel like the best possible place to rediscover the will to live.

Adam Walker, a Columbia student in 1967, meets the charismatic Rudolf Born at a party — and a single violent act, witnessed and then reported with growing unreliability across four different narrative perspectives, shapes the rest of his life.

Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Sidney Orr, recovering from a serious illness, buys a blue Portuguese notebook in Brooklyn and begins writing a story inside it — a story that begins to take on its own momentum, drawing him into questions about fate, authorship, and the reality of the fictional worlds writers create.

Narrated by Mr. Bones, a dog, as he accompanies his dying owner Willy G. Christmas — a homeless poet of genuine but unrecognised talent — to Baltimore to find Willy's former teacher, and then navigates the world alone after Willy's death.