Benjamin Sachs, a writer and political dissident of sorts, is blown apart by his own bomb on a roadside in Wisconsin.

From there the novel is reconstructed by his friend Peter Aaron, who tries to explain how Sachs moved from literary life into secrecy, reinvention, and American extremity. The book is part intellectual mystery, part portrait of friendship, part study of how a person slips out of the ordinary social script and becomes something stranger, harsher, more symbolic.

This is Auster in one of his most recognisable modes, where coincidence, doubling, identity drift, narration as pursuit all make you grip the seat as you read. But Leviathan is tighter and more political than some of his more airy metafictional work, it's inward look at authorship, surveillance, violence, and the seductive American urge to turn private fracture into public gesture make it one of his that I've preferred of them all.