Austerlitz

Description

Sebald's heartbreaking and profound masterpiece of a man's journey through European history, published as an Essential for the first time In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted, Campo Santo and Silent Catastrophes among other publications.

A work of obvious genius and an extraordinary writer way above most of his contemporaries * Literary Review * Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald -- John Lanchester * Daily Telegraph * His tale of one man's odyssey through the dark ages of European history is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world. Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st century * The Times * W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time -- Peter Carey