Siri Hustvedt for Ghost Stories

The tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster – from their first encounter in 80s New York to his recent death.

One of the most anticipated books of 2026 for the Guardian and Observer.

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 early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul's 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 result is an emotional, 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, with many intellectual and creative rooms of her own' Literary Review

'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel

'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie

Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels, five collections of essays, a poetry collection and a memoir. Her books have been listed for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.