"Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripp
ing 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, an
d 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 th
e heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from ob
livion.