4 3 2 1 (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
I have been happily immersed in the lives of the four different Archibald Fergusons. We follow each version through his childhood, teen years, and early 20's with the families, friends, sports, films, and the history of the 50's & 60's intricately intertwined. The author shares his inner thoughts on the writing process through each Archie's love of reading and writing. My copy is underlined and dog eared because I want to refer back to it in the future as so much is beautifully phrased, thoughtful, and wise. Dear Mr. Auster, continue your journey and give me another 866 pages, please!
— From Marilyn Recommends...February 2017 Indie Next List
“I celebrate whenever there's something new by Paul Auster. I wasn't prepared, though, for just how moved, awed, and astonished I found myself while immersed in his inventive and grand novel 4 3 2 1. About a life lived fully, about possibility in love and finding a path to take that's the right one, this is a large novel in all respects, but, most importantly, in spirit. In its writing, Paul Auster has created nothing short of a masterpiece.”
— Mitchell Kaplan (M), Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL
Description
* * * Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize * * *
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review,
NPR, The Globe and Mail, Kirkus Reviews, Huffington Post, and The Spectator UK
"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
"A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. . . . An incredibly moving, true journey."--NPR
New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, Boston Globe Bestseller, National Indiebound Bestseller
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 Medicis etranger, 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.
