4 3 2 1

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He has also been shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.'A masterpiece.' Daily Mail

'Absorbing and immersive . . . the author's greatest novel.' FT

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

On March 3rd, 1947, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous but entirely different paths. Family fortunes diverge. Loves and friendships and passions contrast. Each version of Ferguson's story rushes across the fractured terrain of mid-twentieth century America, in this sweeping story of birthright and possibility, of love and the fullness of life itself.

'Remarkable . . . A novel that contains multitudes.' New York Times

'A vast portrait of the turbulent mid-20th century . . . wonderfully, vividly conveyed.' New StatesmanPaul Auster's first novel in seven years. His greatest, most provocative, most heartbreaking, most satisfying work.
A masterpiece.Absorbing and immersive . . . the author's greatest novel . . . showing that he can out-Roth, out-Updike and out-Franzen the greatest as a richly textured chronicler of modern America in flux, in transit and in crisis . . . The postmodern epic has never felt so much like an addictive long-form TV serial.Remarkable . . . A novel that contains multitudes.A vast portrait of the turbulent mid-20th century . . . wonderfully, vividly conveyed.Ingenious . . . 4 3 2 1 reads like a big social drama . . . while offering the philosophical exploration of one man's fate.An epic home-run.Ambitious and sprawling . . . Immersive . . . Auster has a startling ability to report the world in novel ways.The cold war, the execution of the Rosenbergs, JFK, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam draft, the My Lai massacre, the Kent State shootings: here's a novel as attentive to period detail as Philip Roth would be, or Richard Ford, or Jonathan Franzen. The new expansiveness is reflected in the sentences, which run on, fluent, self-delighting, reluctant to stop. And the relationship between the private and public is neatly evoked through the image of concentric circles, with the world (and war) on the outer rim and the individual (and his battles) a small dot at the centre.4 3 2 1 fizzes with the sheer pleasure of a writer routinely praised or censured as a coterie puzzler, an existentialist dandy, showing the he can out-Roth, out-Updike and out-Franzen the greatest as a richly textured chronicler of modern America in flux, in transit and in crisis. The postmodern epic has never felt so much like an addictive long-form TV serial.'For the information-hungry parent: A Dickensian romp with a modernist twist 4321 looks at the road less travelled, and what might happen if we followed each path.'This was my book of the year for 2017, and not just because of the time I invested in reading all 1100 pages of it. 4321, Auster's account of four versions of the same life progressing in slightly diverging tendrils through 50s and 60s America is a panoptic yet personal look at a moment of existential crisis for the West. Doubling as a pretty efficient door-stopper, Auster doesn't waste time trying to condense the life of his everyman (or everypoet), Ferguson, here, instead guiding us from birth through childhood and into young adulthood, by way of TV, sex, protest and literature. The Sliding Doors structure is brilliant, devastating and pulled off in a way that reinforces the seemingly contradictory ideas that things might have turned out differently, and yet we are always fundamentally the same. Hot tip: skip the last five pages, or, if you read them, ignore what they say.