Sunset Park

by Paul Auster

In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, 28-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure.

Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago.

What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father that he has been avoiding for years.

Pulsing with the energy of Auster’s previous novel, Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.

Paul Auster is the best-selling author of Invisible, Man in the Dark, Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, The New York Trilogy, among many 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 Medicis Etranger 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 thirty languages.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The novel is set in the fall of 2008 and deals with the credit crunch, but it is also a story about love and forgiveness and the relationship between father and son.

Ruined lives of people are mirrored in the abandoned state of fore closed houses the protagonist has to clean up. But his own life ends up as a squat in a group of poor artists. In spite of impending desolation, there is a profound need for community and art.