Austerlitz

'A superb meditation on time, loss and retrieval. A new kind of writing, combining fiction, memoir, travelogue, philosophy and much else besides . . . greatness in literature is still possible' John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year

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.