Paul Auster’s brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner — phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor – has just forgotten on the stove.

Baumgartner’s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next forty years, and back to Baumgartner’s youth in Newark and his Polish-born father’s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.

Rich with compassion, wit, and Auster’s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient moments of ordinary life, Baumgartner asks: Why do we remember certain moments, and forget others? In one of his most luminous works and his first novel since the Booker-shortlisted tour-de-force 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster captures several lifetimes.

Praise for Baumgartner:

“A profound character study of a man whose advancing years are shaped by mourning and memory. . . . Sy lives simultaneously in both the present and the past, and Auster navigates these two narrative tracks nimbly [and] . . . . the effect builds to a beautiful approximation of memory’s fluidity and allure. This is one to savor.”—Publishers Weekly

“Baumgartner’s mind is full of late-life insights and angst, while his capacity for love provides a rich emotional seam. Auster packs a lot into this slim novel . . . An always intriguing writer.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The subject of lost loved ones and all that follows in the wake of such a loss is hardly unusual in contemporary literature, but Paul Auster’s Baumgartner is a worthy addition to the body of fiction that treats the subject. It’s a well-drawn portrait of a man wrestling with grief, and a sensitive character study that displays many of the qualities for which Auster’s been lauded in a long literary career . . . Baumgartner’s story is revealed in episodic fashion and with precise, observant, and sometimes touching detail… Poignant.”—Shelf Awareness

“Auster presents his eighteenth novel, a finely distilled tale of a charmingly self-deprecating and forthright intellectual and romantic . . . Auster’s portrait of a thoughtful man embracing loss and love is a gorgeous, subtly suspenseful revelation of the covert dramas of a contemplative, kind, and expressive life.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Praise for Paul Auster: 

“One of the great American prose stylists of our time.”—New York Times

“Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter.”—New York Review of Books

“One of the great writers of our time.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Contemporary American writing at its best.”—New York Times Book Review, on Invisible

“A literary original who is perfecting a hybrid genre of his own.”—Wall Street Journal