Ghost Stories
A Memoir - 'What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love' David Mitchell
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Ghost Stories
Narrated by:
Siri Hustvedt
Buy Now for £17.94
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Narrated by:
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Siri Hustvedt
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By:
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Siri Hustvedt
Summary
'A deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love' SARAH WATERS
'What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love' DAVID MITCHELL
'Essential reading from an all-time great' SARA COLLINS
Ghost Stories 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.
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.
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.
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.
'She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf' LITERARY REVIEW©2026 Siri Hustvedt (P)2026 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
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Critic reviews
A truly wonderful book. Hustvedt's gift is to be able to write about the most searing of emotions with extraordinary insight, measure and beauty. The result is a deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love. (Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith)
Ghost Stories is a year of grief spun into wise, truthful gold. What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love. (David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas)
All love stories must end as ghost stories. So we are reminded in Siri Hustvedt's tremendously moving portrait of a man, a marriage, and the joys and sorrows of a shared artistic life. Love and grief lie, inseparable, on every page. This is essential reading from an all-time great. (Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton)
Tender, elegiac and erudite, Ghost Stories is a paean to love and to its ultimate expression - grief. A remarkable achievement (Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses)
Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared . . . a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature . . . Ghost Stories has laughter and tears; it's a wonderful celebration of his spirit . . . For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost. (Robert McCrum)
This book is cohesive, melancholy, distinctive and genuinely moving . . . Hustvedt writes so intimately about their physical and intellectual companionship that she makes you feel, in a way not all memoirists can, the dimensions of the crater he left behind . . . Ghost Stories is almost exactly my kind of thing. It's a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair and confusion. It's close to a howl. (Dwight Garner)
A howl of grief for the loss of a husband, father and grandfather
Rich with accounts of their life together
Ghost Stories is, in a sense, a collaboration: sandwiched between Hustvedt's funny, desperately sad account of her husband's sickness are passages written by Auster in the final months of his life in the form of letters to his baby grandson. Literary history is full of talented writer couples, but few seem to have achieved the balance, mutual respect and happy productivity of Hustvedt and Auster. (Susie Goldsbrough)
Poignant love story to the end
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