Man in the Dark

A brilliant, devastating tale about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us.

The Barnes & Noble Review

An elderly man -- widower, father, grandfather -- undergoing a prolonged and proleptic "dark night of the soul" in a house inhabited by his daughter and granddaughter, themselves similarly bereaved and beset with demons of mourning, dissatisfaction and self-recrimination.

A counterfactual world where the United States of America is writhing under a new civil war, and only one seemingly insignificant man has the power to stop the carnage.

Now: consider the inexplicable and unlikely intersection of these two spheres, and the richness of meaning that might result.

Paul Auster's unique novels are often like Chinese boxes, continually opening further to reveal new layers. He approaches his writing as he has approached his life, to an extent: as something of a nomad in a perpetually changing, mysterious landscape.