W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (
The Guardian
), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle.
“Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries,
Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past.
”—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
One of
’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A
Kirkus Reviews
Best Fiction Book of the Century • A
Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly,
and
New York
Magazine Best Book of the Year
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award,
Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize, and
Jewish Quarterly
Wingate Literary Prize
A small child when he comes to England on a
Kindertransport
in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.
Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.