Paul Auster An elderly man -- widower, father, grandfather -- undergoing a prolonged and proleptic dark night of the soul in a house inhabited by his daughter and granddaughter, themselves similarly bereaved and beset with demons of mourning, dissatisfaction and self-recrimination. A counterfactual world where the United States of America is writhing under a new civil war, and only one seemingly insignificant man has the power to stop the carnage. Now: consider the inexplicable and unlikely intersection of these two spheres, and the richness of meaning that might result.