Nevertheless, Auster does not lose his touch for precise and stylistically impeccable prose. At over a thousand pages it is much longer than the author's former novels. Kennedy and the Civil Rights Movement.Unusual for Auster is the length of this work. The novel encompasses his whole life, starting on March 3, 1947, and is set against the background of many important historical events in the United States, such as the presidency and assassination of John F. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.(Robert Frost: 'The Road Not Taken')Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 relates the story of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, an American Jew growing up in New Jersey and New York in the second half of the twentieth century. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.

Meanwhile, readers will take in each Ferguson’s pleasures and ache from each Ferguson’s pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson’s life rushes on.Īs inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel-a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself. New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, Boston Globe Bestseller, National Indiebound Bestseller

An incredibly moving, true journey.” -NPR “A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. A monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.”- Tom Perrotta, The New York Times Book Review NPR, The Globe and Mail, Kirkus Reviews, Huffington Post, and The Spectator UK Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, * * * Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize * * *

4 3 2 1 Paul Auster