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Staff Pick
When you finish 4 3 2 1 you'll be able to say you've finished four novels. Auster's novel follows Archibald Isaac Ferguson through four different lives that alter based on little differences from the first chapters. It's an extremely inventive and compelling piece of work. For readers who have ever looked back at their lives and thought, "I wonder what my life would be like if X hadn't happened," Auster has the answer. Recommended By Jeffrey J., Powells.com
Yes, an 880-page novel can be daunting to almost anyone, but once you start reading, each and every page is so satisfying and absorbing, you don't care how many pages you've read and how many you have left. Auster is an amazing storyteller with sentences that captivate, and the clever approach of telling four stories simultaneously about the same characters is brilliant. Definitely put this on your 2017 "to read" list.
Recommended By Kim S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel — sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself: a masterpiece.
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. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. 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. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. 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.
As 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. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
Review
"Almost everything about Auster's new novel is big.... Satisfyingly rich in detail.... A significant and immersive entry to a genre that stretches back centuries and includes Augie March and Tristram Shandy." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Auster has been turning readers' heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling.... He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date... [a] ravishing opus." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Auster’s first novel in seven years is.... An ingenious move.... Auster’s sense of possibility, his understanding of what all his Fergusons have in common, with us and one another, is a kind of quiet intensity, a striving to discover who they are.... [He] reminds us that not just life, but also narrative is always conditional, that it only appears inevitable after the fact." Kirkus Review (Starred Review)
Synopsis
The Millions's "Most Anticipated"
Vulture's "Most Exciting Book Releases for 2017"
The Washington Post's Books to Read in 2017
Chicago Tribune's "Books We're Excited About in 2017"
Town & Country's "5 Books to Start Off 2017 the Right Way"
Read it Forward, Favorite Reads of January 2017
"An epic bildungsroman . . . . Original and complex . . . . A monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes."
--Tom Perrotta, The New York Times Book Review
Paul Auster's greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel--a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself.
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. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. 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. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. 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.
As 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. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
About the Author
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.