Ghost Stories A memoir

<p><h3>One of the most anticipated books of 2026 for the <i>Guardian,</i> <i>Observer </i>and BBC Culture</h3><br><h4>'A remarkable achievement'<br>LOUISE KENNEDY<br><br>'A deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love'<br>SARAH WATERS<br><br>'What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love'<br>DAVID MITCHELL<br><br>'Essential reading from an all-time great'<br>SARA COLLINS<br>The tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster - from their first encounter in 1980s New York to his death in 2024</h4><br><i>Ghost Stories</i> is Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster.<br><br>It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between November 2023 and 3 May 2024, the day of Paul's funeral; emails Siri sent to friends during his cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son.<br><br>The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing - the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 2024.<br><br>Unflinching, tender and wise, this is the full-bodied story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday.<br><br><h4>A note from Siri</h4><br><i>'I began writing Ghost Stories shortly after my husband, Paul Auster, died on April 30th 2024. My meditations on Paul's cancer, his death, my grief, the potent feeling I had of his presence on the day he was buried, and my memories from the years we spent together are interwoven with several texts that were written before he died: twelve letters I wrote to friends during his cancer treatment; journal entries I wrote between early November, 2023 and May 3, 2024; and three love letters I wrote to Paul in 1981, when he left me for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life. Although I knew Paul had saved those letters, I hadn't read them since they were written and had only a foggy recollection of their content.</i><br><br><i>In the last month of his life, Paul began writing what he hoped would be a small book of letters to our grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, who was born on January 1st, 2024. Paul was too weak to finish it as planned, but the thirty-five pages he did manage to write are interwoven in this book.</i><br><br><i>I want to stress that Paul's text is not an appendix to mine but an integral part of the book as a whole. Because the memoir turns on attachment, betweenness, and dialogue, all crucial to the love affair that lasted forty-three years, the insertion of one author's text into another's, is, in this case, essential to the memoir's overall meaning.'</i><br><br><h4>Praise for Siri Hustvedt</h4><br>'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom'<br><b>Salman Rushdie<br></b><br>'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear'<br><b>Hilary Mantel<br><br></b>'She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf, with many intellectual and creative rooms of her own'<br><i><b>Literary Review</b></i></p>