This is another of Paul Auster's complex, compulsive books -- part detective story, part ghost story; a tale within a tale within a manuscript.

Sidney Orr (appropriately named) is recovering from a serious illness. One day he wanders into a new small stationery shop, called the Paper Palace, and is taken by a blue notebook, the very thing he needs to start him writing again. But what to write? It must be memorable and worthwhile.

Then an episode in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon comes to him: a man is hit on the head by a falling beam and "walks away from his life and disappears".

Orr's fictional hero, Nick Bowen, a top editor in a prestigious New York company, finds a new novel on his desk and he is smitten both by Oracle Night and by Grace, the granddaughter of the author. Hit on the head -- by a gargoyle -- he walks away from his unhappy marriage and boring career.

The world is no longer "the same orderly place he thought it was ... but is governed by chance" as he finds himself trapped in a terrifying situation from which he cannot escape.

Meanwhile, Orr's marriage is beginning to show cracks and to reveal secrets that might destroy them both. His muse has him in thrall as he moves back and forth between his life and that of his fictional hero.

Is the blue notebook using him or is he using the notebook?

Auster's triple tale is complicated by long involved footnotes which make the novel dense and absorbing.

Auster is an admirer of Don Quixote so, not surprisingly, the real and illusionary dissolve in his work and one feels, like Orr, that "somebody has taken the lid off life and let him look at the works".