Sunset Park

Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1 and The New York Trilogy comes Paul Auster's luminous, tour de force novel set during the 2008 economic collapse. "Auster fans and newcomers will find in Sunset Park his usual beautifully nuanced prose.... [and] a tremendous crash bang of an ending.” — NPR Sunset Park opens with twenty-eight-year-old Miles Heller trashing out foreclosed houses in Florida, the latest stop in his flight across the country. When Miles falls in love with Pilar Sanchez, he finds himself fleeing once again, going back to New York, where his family still lives, and into an abandoned house of young squatters in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Woven together from various points of view—that of Miles's father, an independent book publisher trying to stay afloat, Miles's mother, a celebrated actress preparing her return to the New York stage, and the various men and women who live in the house—"Auster seems to carry all of humanity inside him" (The Boston Globe).