Hello, I'm Melissa Adwarnie, and you're listening to NPR's Book of the Day.

A tragedy. A love story. A story about ghosts and revenge. And also a lyrical homage to New York City?

Elegie in Blue, the latest novel from writer Mark Helprin, is hard to define.

Perhaps that's because, as Halpern tells weekend edition Scott Simon, in many ways, the book is autobiographical.

The unnamed narrator of Mark Helperin's new novel, Elegie in Blue, says his allegiance is to ghosts.

Loved ones he has lost in an epical life in which we meet him at the age of 82,

living in a subsidized studio apartment with an expansive view that runs from Brooklyn's rooftops

to the sky and to the sea,

and the narrative is interspersed with insights that stand above the story in their depiction of New York.

Mark Helper, and the number one New York Times bestselling author of The Oceans and the Stars and Winter's Tale joins us in her studios.

Thanks so much for being with us.

You're welcome.

How did this man of wealth and standing, surrounded by love, wind up alone in a kind of crow's nest apartment in Brooklyn?

Well, when I was a senior in college, my thesis was on Hamlet.

The title was Love in a Time of Violence.

And this narrator who was born in 1940

lost his father in the war,

and then he was a grunt in Vietnam,

had a six-hour surgery without anesthesia.

Then his son was killed in the second Gulf War,

and his wife was killed in a terrorist incident.

So that alone is enough to shake your foundations.

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