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  • Published: 18 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241984482
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $28.00

Austerlitz




Sebald's heartbreaking and profound masterpiece of a man's journey through European history, published as an Essential for the first time

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

  • Published: 18 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241984482
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

W. G. Sebald

W G Sebald (Author)
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001.

Michael Hulse and Simon Rae (Translators)
Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. He is based in Warwick. Simon Rae is a playwright , novelist and broadcaster (he presented Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' for several years). He lives in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Both Michael Hulse and Simon Rae are published poets and winners of the National Poetry Competition.

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Praise for Austerlitz

Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald

John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph

A work of obvious genius and an extraordinary writer way above most of his contemporaries

Literary Review

His tale of one man's odyssey through the dark ages of European history is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world. Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st century

The Times

W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time

Peter Carey