Man in the Dark

by Paul Auster, Faber, 160pp, £14.99. In Paul Auster's latest novel, we join August Brill, a widowed journalist recovering from a car accident, for "one sleepless night", said Hugo Barnacle in The Sunday Times.

Brill tries to take his mind off his wife's recent death, and the brutal murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend in Iraq, by telling himself a story - imagining a parallel world, in which America is fighting a civil war which erupted after the disputed 2000 election.

The main character in the story is told to assassinate the man deemed responsible for this disaster: the man who has imagined it, the sleepless dreamer, August Brill. If this sounds familiar - a man obsessively telling himself stories, and stories within stories - then that's because it closely resembles many of Auster's novels, said Tom Gatti in The Times.

"A generous reader would argue that he has seized on his essential themes (narrative, words, chance, death), and is repeatedly recasting them in ever more economical and powerful ways. A fed-up reader would reply that Auster is a lazy old chancer writing the same book over and over again." Man in the Dark "would be an irritating novel if Auster were less sincere", said Ruth Scurr in The Daily Telegraph. As it is, it is both harrowing and ultimately "life-affirming".

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 11, 2008