4321 Paul Auster - English language - Softcover

Auster, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571324657 ISBN 13: 9780571324651

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2017

Synopsis

LONGLISTED 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 paths. Four Fergusons will go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. 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.

About this title

Review:

A masterpiece., Daily Mail

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., Financial Times

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

A vast portrait of the turbulent mid-20th century . . . wonderfully, vividly conveyed., New Statesman

Ingenious . . . 4 3 2 1 reads like a big social drama . . . while offering the philosophical exploration of one man's fate., Esquire

An epic home-run., Spectator

Ambitious and sprawling . . . Immersive . . . Auster has a startling ability to report the world in novel ways., USA Today

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. -- Blake Morrison, Guardian

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. -- Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

'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.', ELLE Gift Guide

Book Description:

Paul Auster's first novel in seven years. His greatest, most provocative, most heartbreaking, most satisfying work.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0571324657
• ISBN 13: 9780571324651
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1088