Ghost Stories

*Ghost Stories* is Siri Hustvedt’s most personal book yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, Paul Auster. It includes personal and never-before-seen writing from Paul himself, in the form of letters he wrote to Siri, as well as his last unfinished work, "Letters to Miles." The book is both an elegy and a reckoning—a chronicle of personal loss that also bears witness to the cascading sorrows of recent years, including the tragic deaths of Hustvedt’s stepson and infant granddaughter.

Hustvedt explores how grief unmoors time, how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday, and how the body experiences the absence of love as a presence. She meditates on the things and papers Auster left behind and reflects on the forty-three years they spent together, and on the rituals of mourning and the nature of language, memory, and the self.

Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on.

"One of the most anticipated books of 2026 for the Guardian, Observer and BBC Culture
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 1980s New York to his death in 2024
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 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 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 1st January 2024.

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." —Goodreads