The New York Trilogy : City Of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room

Paul Auster's brilliant debut novels, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, are here collected in a cloth edition for the first time in the United States. These three novels brought Auster international acclaim for his creation of a new genre, mixing elements of the standard detective fiction and postmodern fiction. City of Glass combines dark, Kafka-like humor with all the suspense of a Hitchcock film as a writer of detective stories becomes embroiled in a complex and puzzling series of events, beginning with a call from a stranger in the middle of the night asking for the author - Paul Auster - himself. Ghosts, the second volume of this interconnected trilogy, introduces Blue, a private detective hired to watch a man named Black, who, as he becomes intermeshed into a haunting and claustrophobic game of hide-and-seek, is lured into the very trap he has created. The final volume, The Locked Room, also begins with a mystery, told this time in the first-person narrative. The nameless hero journeys into the unknown as he attempts to reconstruct the past which he has experienced almost as a dream. Together these three fictions lead the reader on adventures that expand the mind as they entertain. The New York Trilogy is an astonishing and original book: three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. Auster's book is modern fiction at its finest: bold, arresting and unputdownable. IT was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.