'The delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love. Love of life, love of the world, love of family... Ghost Stories will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know - we all know - are yet to come'
OBSERVER
'A profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature'
INDEPENDENT
'Rich with accounts of their life together'
SUNDAY TIMES
'Distinctive and genuinely moving'
NEW YORK TIMES
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.
'A remarkable achievement'
LOUISE KENNEDY
'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
A note from Siri
'I began writing Ghost Stories shortly after my husband, Paul Auster, died on April 30th 2024. My meditations on Paul's cancer, his death, my grief, the potent feeling I had of his presence on the day he was buried, and my memories from the years we spent together are interwoven with several texts that were written before he died: twelve letters I wrote to friends during his cancer treatment; journal entries I wrote between early November, 2023 and May 3, 2024; and three love letters I wrote to Paul in 1981, when he left me for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life. Although I knew Paul had saved those letters, I hadn't read them since they were written and had only a foggy recollection of their content.
In the last month of his life, Paul began writing what he hoped would be a small book of letters to our grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, who was born on January 1st, 2024. Paul was too weak to finish it as planned, but the thirty-five pages he did manage to write are interwoven in this book.
I want to stress that Paul's text is not an appendix to mine but an integral part of the book as a whole. Because the memoir turns on attachment, betweenness, and dialogue, all crucial to the love affair that lasted forty-three years, the insertion of one author's text into another's, is, in this case, essential to the memoir's overall meaning.'
Praise for Siri Hustvedt
'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
'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear'
Hilary Mantel
'She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf, with many intellectual and creative rooms of her own'
Literary Review
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Ghost Stories 9781399753845 Hardback
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Ghost Stories By Siri Hustvedt
There are books that one reads. There are books that one admires. And then there are books that quietly rearrange the furniture of one's inner life while one is not paying attention. Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt belongs firmly in the latter category. At first glance, it is a book about los…
There are books that one reads. There are books that one admires. And then there are books that quietly rearrange the furniture of one's inner life while one is not paying attention. Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt belongs firmly in the latter category. At first glance, it is a book about loss. More specifically, it circles around the death of Hustvedt's husband, the novelist Paul Auster. Yet to describe it merely as a memoir of bereavement would be rather like describing Westminster Abbey as a collection of stones. Technically accurate, perhaps, but hopelessly inadequate. Hustvedt writes with remarkable clarity and tenderness. Grief is present on every page, but never as a theatrical guest demanding attention. Instead, it moves through the book like a quiet companion, sitting unobtrusively in the corner while memories, reflections, dreams, and fragments of a shared life drift across the stage. What makes the book so compelling is its refusal to settle into a single category. It is memoir, meditation, love letter, intellectual inquiry, and ghost story all at once. The ghosts are not the rattling-chain variety. They are the lingering presences of memory, the people who continue to inhabit our thoughts long after they have departed the room. Reading it, I found myself thinking not only about mortality but also about inheritance. Not the kind that solicitors discuss over polished tables, but the sort that passes quietly from one generation to the next. Stories. Values. Small observations. The things we mean to say someday. One passage led me to an unexpected question: what might I leave behind for my grandchildren? Not possessions, but words. Hustvedt describes how Auster, after learning he was seriously ill, began writing letters to his grandson. It struck me as one of the most human acts imaginable. A way of extending a hand across time. That thought lingered long after I closed the book. The finest books enlarge our lives. Ghost Stories does so with grace, intelligence, and a profound sense of humanity. It is moving without sentimentality, thoughtful without pretension, and deeply personal while speaking to experiences that belong to us all. I finished it with moist eyes, a grateful heart, and a growing conviction that perhaps I ought to begin writing a few letters of my own.
- Authors:
- Hustvedt, Siri
- Year Published:
- 2026
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Format:
- Hardback
- Illustrations Note:
- N/A
- ISBN:
- 9781399753845
- Number of Pages:
- 320
- Publication Date:
- 05/05/2026
- Publisher:
- Hodder & Stoughton
- Language:
- English
- SKU:
- 9781399753845