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.

Among the greatest and most moving achievements of contemporary German writing"(Rheinischer Merkur), the four long narratives in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants appear at first sight to be straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. But Sebald has wrought something altogether new. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs, it is an astonishingly beautiful book -- "one of the best novels to appear since WWII" (Review of Contemporary Fiction).The Emigrants was chosen three times -- by Susan Sontag, Tariq Ali, and A.S. Byatt -- in the London Times Literary Supplement as the 1996 International Book of the Year. Susan Sontag wrote: "W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants is the most extraordinary, thrilling new book I've read this year...indeed for several years. It is like nothing I've ever read...I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization. I know of few books written in our time but this is one which attains the sublime".