W. G. Sebaldβs celebrated masterpiece, βone of the supreme works of art of our timeβ (The Guardian), follows a manβs search for the answer to his lifeβs central riddle.
βHaunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergmanβs Wild Strawberries, Kafkaβs troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proustβs Remembrance of Things Past.ββMichiko Kakutani, The New York Times
One of The New York Timesβs 10 Best Books of the 21st Century β’ A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century β’ 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 travelersβ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebaldβs unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitzβs ongoing efforts to understand who he isβa struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.