Austerlitz

Austerlitz follows a man's search for answers to his life's central riddle. Jacques Austerlitz arrives in England as a child on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939 and is raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife, who tell him nothing of his real family. Decades later, fleeting memories return to him, and he follows their trail back to the world he left behind half a century before. Faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over thirty years, an unnamed narrator and Austerlitz meet in train stations and travelers' stops across England and Europe, discussing Austerlitz's ongoing efforts to understand who he is. His struggle to impose coherence on memory embodies the universal human search for identity. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. It was named one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the 21st Century and a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century.