David Shankbone · CC BY 3.0

Paul Auster made his name with The New York Trilogy (1987), detective stories that used the conventions of noir to interrogate identity and authorship rather than solve a crime — a move he returned to across three decades and more than a dozen novels, including Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions and the sprawling 4 3 2 1 (2017), which imagined four different lives for the same person. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages.