Paul Auster

According to family legend, Ferguson's grandfather departed on foot from his native city of Minsk with one hundred rubles sewn into the lining of his jacket, traveled west to Hamburg through Warsaw and Berlin, and then booked passage on a ship called the Empress of China, which crossed the Atlantic in rough winter …

In the Country of Last Things is a dystopian epistolary novel written by American author Paul Auster and first published in 1987.