Quatre voix qui se complètent et se répondent pour parler du désarroi désespéré de ceux qui, en quittant leur pays, ont perdu leur histoire.

Dans une conférence donnée à Zurich à l’automne 1997, où il évoque un épisode tabou en Allemagne – le bombardement massif de villes allemandes par les Alliés à la fin de la guerre –, et dans un texte consacré à Alfred Andersch, Sebald dénonce sans ménagements le sentiment de culpabilité des intellectuels allemands qui fausserait leur jugement autant que leur inspiration esthétique.

Par ce portrait saisissant d'un émigrant déraciné, fragile, érudit et digne, l'auteur élève une sorte d'anti-monument pour tous ceux qui, au cours de l'Histoire, se retrouvent pourchassés, déplacés, coupés de leurs racines - sans jamais en comprendre la raison ni le sens.

Austerlitz is W. G. Sebald's haunting novel of post-war Europe.

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. Austerlitz is W.G. Sebald's melancholic masterpiece.

'Mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

'Greatness in literature is still possible' John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year

'A work of obvious genius' Literary Review

'A fusion of the mystical and the solid ... His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher aim' Evening Standard

'Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art' The Times Literary Supplement

'I have never read a book that provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis' Observer

'A great book by a great writer' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund

A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund 

A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund 

Après la mort de l'auteur, le fragment d'un livre sur la Corse a été trouvé - quatre magnifiques morceaux de prose qui, ici, sont rassemblés avec quatorze essais littéraires jamais publiés en France. Qu'il parle de Piana, de Nabokov, de musique, de Handke ou de Jean Améry - la voix de Sebald est identifiable entre toutes.

Ce voyage à pied à travers le Suffolk, région historiquement riche de la côte est de l'Angleterre, est prétexte à un ensemble de récits passionnants au pouvoir symbolique enchanteur.