Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. As a small child, Jacques Austerlitz arrives in England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939. He is raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who tell him nothing of his real family.

When Jacques is much older, fleeting memories return, and, obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half-century before. Faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.

This haunting novel of sublime ambition and power unfolds over the course of a 30-year conversation that takes place in train stations and travellers’ stops across England and Europe. It dwells on various subjects – railway architecture, military fortifications, insects, plants and animals, the constellations, works of art, a small circus, and the three cities that loom over the book: London, Paris, and Prague.

In Jacques Austerlitz, Sebald embodies the universal human search for identity and the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the mind’s defences against trauma.