You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, Paul Auster sat down and wrote the first entry of Winter Journal, his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life as seen through the history of his body. Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe of physical sensation, of pleasures and pains, moving from the awakening of sexual desire as an adolescent to the ever-deepening bonds of married love, from the shocks of violent accidents to an account of his mother's death, from meditations on eating and sleeping to the 'scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity' that set him on a new course as a writer. Winter Journal is a book that looks straight into the heart of what it means to be alive.