Oracle Night

Auster’s radical modern ghost story from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: ‘a literary voice for the ages’ (Guardian)

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.

If The New York Trilogy was Paul Auster’s detective story, his mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book – only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster’s reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.

‘His old-fashioned art of creating suspense . . . which rivals M. R. James or Conan Doyle. In fact, Oracle Night is best read as a post-modern ghost story.’ The Guardian