Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
SEBALD, W.G. Austerlitz. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell.
First English edition, first impression. Sebald’s final novel. First issue dust-jacket with £16.99 to the rear flap.
A haunting mixture of history and memoir, Austerlitz 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, 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.
414 pp. B/w photos. Hardback. (ISBN: 9780241141250).
As new in dust-jacket.