Austerlitz

Austerlitz is about memory and forgetting, and the shadows of absence and guilt that the Holocaust cast forward into the future. Written in Sebald's trademark gorgeous and unhurried prose, the novel follows Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian whose investigations into his subject, and into the labyrinth of his own confused memory, lead him inexorably back into his past as a child of the Kindertransport - the few thousand lucky Jewish children evacuated from Europe before the start of war - and into the monstrous destruction at the heart of European history.