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Leviathan

by Paul Auster

A friendship reconstructed through an investigation

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Regular price $36.32 USD Sale price $23.24 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A friendship reconstructed through an investigation

Paul Auster frames Leviathan as Peter Aaron’s attempt to account for the death of his friend Benjamin Sachs. Aaron’s search reaches back through their friendship and Sachs’s disappearance after a near-fatal fall, while the investigation around the case raises questions about who gets to shape the story. The novel’s central tension lies between personal memory and the public account being assembled by others, against a premise where violence enters ordinary life. Friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the effort to preserve a truthful record are closely linked in this mystery-centered novel.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in mysteries shaped by memory and an investigation.
  • Readers drawn to novels about friendship, betrayal, and estrangement.
  • Readers who enjoy stories concerned with competing accounts of the truth.

Themes

Friendship and betrayalMemory and truthViolence in everyday lifeEstrangement and disappearance

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A "compelling" (Los Angeles Times) novel of friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday--from "a literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own" (The Wall Street Journal)

"Rich and complex . . . with fully fleshed characters, a fast-paced plot, thematic sophistication, and narrative cunning."--The Boston Globe

"Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin."

So begins Peter Aaron's story about his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a world he shared. And then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or might not have been intentional, Sachs disappeared. Now Aaron must piece together the life that led to Sach's death. His sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it--before those who are investigating the case invent an account of their own.

Leviathan is a daring and immensely moving story by an author whom The Times Literary Supplement has called "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers."
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