Almost a year into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is Sept 18, 1982, and for another nine days Orr will live beneath the spell of this blank book, stuck inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to demolish his marriage and undermine his trust in reality.

How come his wife abruptly breakdown in tears in the backseat approximately Oracle Night of a taxi simply hours after Sidney starts writing in the notebook? Why does M.R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously shut down his business the very next day? What are the contacts between a 1938 Warsaw telephone listing and a lost novel where the hero can predict the near future? At what stage does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the best expression of like?

Paul Auster’s mesmerizing eleventh book reads as an old-fashioned ghost tale. But you will find no ghosts within this book — just flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a yoga on the type of time and a journey through the labyrinth of 1 man’s creativity, Oracle Night can be a narrative tour de power that confirms Auster’s status as one of the boldest, most unique writers at work in America today.