Ghost Stories

Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared . . . a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature . . . Ghost Stories has laughter and tears; it's a wonderful celebration of his spirit . . . For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost.

Independent

This book is cohesive, melancholy, distinctive and genuinely moving . . . Hustvedt writes so intimately about their physical and intellectual companionship that she makes you feel, in a way not all memoirists can, the dimensions of the crater he left behind . . . Ghost Stories is almost exactly my kind of thing. It's a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair and confusion. It's close to a howl.

New York Times

A howl of grief for the loss of a husband, father and grandfather

Literary Review

Rich with accounts of their life together

Sunday Times Culture

Ghost Stories is, in a sense, a collaboration: sandwiched between Hustvedt's funny, desperately sad account of her husband's sickness are passages written by Auster in the final months of his life in the form of letters to his baby grandson. Literary history is full of talented writer couples, but few seem to have achieved the balance, mutual respect and happy productivity of Hustvedt and Auster.

The Times

Beautiful . . . [Hustvedt] is a writer of astonishing range and depth . . . it seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds. Auster comes across here perfectly as he was: smart, funny, caustic, loving, idealistic - exasperated to the last by the politics of his native land. Hustvedt (who always looks so cool in her photographs, even when not dressed in a jumpsuit) reveals the nerves that co-exist with her grit and wisdom . . . the delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love. Love of life, love of the world, love of family . . . Ghost Stories deserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know - we all know - are yet to come.

Observer

Extraordinary . . . a moving love story . . . [Hustvedt] delivers a powerful narrative as a witness to death and dying, in an acutely and thoughtfully observed book. Ghost Stories can and should change the way you think about life with and alongside others who matter to you. It deserves many readers

The Conversation

Raw and touching . . . sorrowful, tender, candid, even funny, Ghost Stories is a book about death that brims with life, in all its misery and joy. This a story of partnership: romantic, domestic, literary

Daily Mail

This heart-breaking memoir shares how novelist Husvedt navigated her husband Paul Auster's terminal cancer diagnosis and death in 2024. It's a powerful tribute to their long union and love

Good Housekeeping

Deeply moving . . . Hustvedt's grief, by and for a writer, warrants close reading: many of its complexities seep out into the sentence . . . Without [Auster] the future is a painful space for Hustvedt to inhabit, and the process of getting there is set out with great generosity in her writing.

TLS

A wise meditation on grief and its many mutations . . . Ghost Stories is not merely about mourning but is itself an act of mourning integrating into its structure the disjointed, recursive nature of the experience itself. It is an artfully broken book . . . The wise, paradoxically vital account of [Hustvedt's] unending grief might be just the very form Auster would have wished his ghostly return to take

New Statesman

I was bowled over by Siri Hustvedt's Ghost Stories, a gorgeous, poignant memoir of her life with Paul Auster, written in the rawness of the wake of his death

Guardian