Austerlitz (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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 The New York Times’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.

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. His other books include After Nature, Campo Santo, and On the Natural History of Destruction. He died in December 2001.