Ghost Stories
On sale
5th May 2026
Price: £24.99
‘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 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.
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
‘It is Hustvedt’s gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear’ HILARY MANTEL, GUARDIAN
‘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 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.
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
‘It is Hustvedt’s gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear’ HILARY MANTEL, GUARDIAN
Newsletter Signup
By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
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.
Ghost Stories is a year of grief spun into wise, truthful gold. What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love.
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.