Faber announces a heart-breaking new Paul Auster novel, Baumgartner
23 March 2023
Faber today announced Baumgartner, a novel of love, memory and grief by Paul Auster, ‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’ (New York Times).
This is Auster’s eighteenth novel, and his first novel since the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted 4 3 2 1. Walter Donohue acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Carol Mann at the Carol Mann Agency. In addition, Carol’s team have sold rights in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Greek, German and other territories. US and Canadian rights were sold to Morgan Entrekin at Grove. Baumgartner will publish simultaneously in the US and the UK on 7 November 2023. Rowohlt will also publish the German language edition in November.
Baumgartner’s life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed nine years earlier. Now seventy-one, Baumgartner still struggles to live in her absence as the novel unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence.
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?
Walter Donohue said:
‘We are thrilled that, at this point in Paul Auster’s long career at Faber, he has produced this warm and wonderful miniature. Baumgartner is a late masterpiece, which aches with the tremors of enduring love.’
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions and The Music of Chance, among other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He has also been shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Praise for Paul Auster:
‘Auster presents four lovingly detailed portrayals of the intensity of youth – of awkwardness and frustration, but also of passion for books, films, sport, politics and sex . . . What he is driving at is not only the role of contingency and the unexpected, but the ‘what-ifs’ that haunt us, the imaginary lives we hold in our minds that run parallel to our actual existence.’ Guardian (for 4 3 2 1)
‘There is still a hint of the magical in the everyday events that he chronicles.’ The Times
‘A master of the modern American fable’. Independent
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A late masterpiece of love, memory and grief by Paul Auster, ‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’