The American Jewish writer Paul Auster has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize for his novel 4321 which gives the reader four versions of the life of a Jewish boy born, like Auster, in 1947.
The New York Times called the book “a work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft, a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.”
It tells four versions of the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson from New Jersey. Each version of Archie falls in love with a girl called Amy Schneiderman.
It is a long book, with the hardback edition running to 866 pages. Auster said: “Because of the novel’s premise, I knew it would be long before I started writing it. The challenge was to keep it as swift and lean as possible, which meant cutting down rather than adding on. I know the book is an elephant, but I hope it's a sprinting elephant.”
