'Epic' story from Paul Auster to Faber

Faber & Faber is set to publish Paul Auster's first novel in seven years, an “epic" story of birthright and possibility titled 4 3 2 1.

Faber acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Carol Mann.

4 3 2 1 tells the story of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, who is born on 3rd March 1947. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four Fergusons made of the same genetic material, four boys who are the same boy, will go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Loves and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Chapter by chapter, the rotating narratives evolve into an elaborate dance of inner worlds enfolded within the outer forces of history as, one by one, the intimate plots of the four Fergusons' stories rush on across the tumultuous and fractured terrain of mid twentieth-century America. A boy grows up-again and again and again.

The publisher said: "As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, 4 3 2 1 is an unforgettable tour de force, the crowning work of this masterful writer's extraordinary career."

Mitzi Angel, publisher at Faber, said: “Faber & Faber first published Paul Auster in 1987, nearly thirty years ago. The New York Trilogy was a landmark in twentieth-century American fiction and has found hundreds of thousands of readers across the world. It is a great honour to be publishing his greatest, most provocative, most heartbreaking work yet.”

Auster's last novel Sunset Park was published by Faber in 2010. He will celebrate his seventieth birthday in 2017 and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The novel will be published in February 2017 in the UK and simultaneously in the US by Henry Holt.