Sunset Park

Auster's novel of love and forgiveness from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation he has been avoiding for years. Set against the backdrop of the devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. He and Spencer Ostrander collaborated on Bloodbath Nation. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honours include the Prix Medicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the Screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work was translated into more than forty languages. His final novel, Baumgartner, was published in November 2023. He died on 30 April 2024.