Man in the Dark

by Paul Auster

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident. Plagued by insomnia, he tries to push back thoughts of things he would prefer to forget - his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus - by telling himself stories. He imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself.
In this other America the twin towers did not fall, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union, and a bloody civil war ensued. Brill gradually opens up to his granddaughter, recounting the story of his marriage and confronting the grim reality of Titus’s death.
Man in the Dark is a novel of our time, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night whilst also celebrating the existence of ordinary joys in a brutal world

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in the United States in 1947. He graduated from Columbia University with an MA degree. In 1970 he worked as a merchant seaman on an Esso oil tanker. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in France, spending two years in Paris and one in Provence. After returning to New York in 1974, he began his writing career. Throughout the 1970s he wrote mainly poetry and essays which appeared in various magazines including the New York Review of Books. During the 1980s he concentrated on prose writing: a memoir and four novels were published. His screenplay Smoke and Blue in the Face was published in April 1996 to coincide with the release of the film, and in 1999 Faber published the screenplay Lulu on the Bridge. The Art of Hunger (a collection of essays, interviews and prose) and his Selected Poems were published in November 1998. He is the author of twelve novels: The New York Trilogy, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr Vertigo, Timbuktu, The Book of Illusions, Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies, Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark. He also edited the best-selling True Tales of American Life, the NPR National Story Project anthology. He is married with two children and lives in Brooklyn. .