A Picador Paperback Original

A new movie written and directed by Paul Auster, starring David Thewlis, Irene Jacob, Michael Imperioli, and Sophie Auster.

From The New York Trilogy to The Book of Illusions and Travels in the Scriptorium, Paul Auster is one of America’s most spectacularly inventive novelists. Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge established him as an award-winning filmmaker. The Inner Life of Martin Frost brings together his talents as a novelist and filmmaker with a work that is tender, moving, and funny.

Searching for solitude, the writer Martin Frost borrows a friend’s country house. Waking up one morning, he is shocked to find a nearly naked young woman beside him in bed. She also has a key to the house and claims to be the owner’s niece. Martin’s initial annoyance at Claire’s intrusion is rapidly forgotten as he falls passionately in love with her. Even when it is revealed that Claire is not who she claims to be, their idyllic passion continues–until she suddenly falls ill.

The Inner Life of Martin Frost is based on an imaginary film that appears in his novel The Book of Illusions. Unlike the fictional Hector Spelling’s lost 1946 black and white film of the same title, Auster’s luminous celebration of the mysteries of love, art, and the imagination will be released in 2007.