[Tex/LaTex] How to start document with empty page followed by table of contents

Question

In a book class document, I am trying to insert one empty page before the table of contents.

I tried with the following code :

\documentclass[a4paper]{book}
\begin{document}
    \thispagestyle{empty}\null\newpage
    \tableofcontents
    ...
\end{document}

But the code produces :

1. Empty page
2. Plain page
3. Table of contents

How can I insert just one empty page before the table of contents? Why doesn't the code produce what I expected?

Answer 1

As per my original comment, the book class always wants to put the contents page on an odd page number, since in a book, that is on the right-hand page. Thus, when skipping a page, the book class will want to skip an extra page to get to an odd page. You can fool it by fudging the page number.

\documentclass[a4paper]{book}
\begin{document}
\setcounter{page}{0}
    \thispagestyle{empty}
    \tableofcontents
    ...
\end{document}

p.s. This will put the Contents on a page numbered as 1, even though it is the second page of the document.