Austerlitz

Paperback, 298 pages

Published 2001

Modern Library eBook (2011)

Greatest Books (amalgamated list of best books)

Translated from the German by: Anthea Bell (2001)

Introduction by: James Wood (2011)

"Austerlitz", the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Aus-terlitz 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, he 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.

National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2001)