<i>Austerlitz</i>, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by &#8220;one of the most gripping writers imaginable&#8221; (<i>The New York Review of Books</i>), is the story of a man&#8217;s search for the answer to his life&#8217;s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a <i>Kindertransport</i> in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Aus-terlitz 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, he 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.