Books like Here and Now by Paul Auster

Professor David Lurie, a divorced academic in South Africa, faces professional exile after an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated farm, where the fallout of a violent encounter threatens their fragile existence.

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy weaves three interlinked detective‑style narratives that explore identity and the city’s uncanny parallels, turning ordinary clues into profound questions of human existence.

In post‑war South Africa, Michael K journeys with his dying mother to her rural home, only to find himself alone amid chaotic armies. Imprisoned, he cannot endure confinement and escapes, striving to live with dignity.

While marooned on an island in the Atlantic, Sue Barton finds herself a character in a fiction novel. She spends a year with two other castaways, a mute Negro called Friday and Robinson Cruso.

A humorous, autobiographical novel charting J. M. Coetzee’s formative years in Cape Town, as a biographer reconstructs his life through friends’ memories, revealing the writer’s awkward youth and emerging craft.

After a fatal plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer is haunted by grief until he discovers a lost silent‑film comedy starring Hector Mann. Obsessed with the vanished star, Zimmer’s search drives him into a dreamlike world of lies, revelations, and unexpected love.

*The Invention of Solitude* is Paul Auster's first memoir, published in the year 1982. The book is divided into two separate parts, Portrait of an Invisible Man, which concerns the sudden death of Auster's father, and The Book of Memory, in which Auster delivers his personal opinions concerning subjects such as coincidence, fate, and solitude, subjects that have become trademarks of Auster's works.

Mrs. Cullen, the narrator in this novel, is an elderly white woman dying of cancer in a country afflicted with its own mortal sickness. "In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son. A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep."--Goodreads.com.

Explore the enduring love of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald through over 75% of their previously unpublished letters, accompanied by scholarly commentary and intimate photographs.