Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald, 2001 (11 of time, memory, connections and coincidences, emigration, comings and goings, setting forth, architecture and art, wandering, dreams.  The Holocaust provides the backdrop for this tale of Jacques Austerlitz born to Jewish parents in Prague in 1934 and sent to Bala, Wales to live with Enyr and Gwendolyn Elias.  Unaware of his past, Austerlitz begins to become curious when his name is changed to JA when he is graduating from his preparatory school and heading to Oxford and becomes a naturalized Brit in 1954.  Living in Paris and London where he gets a degree from the Courtald in 1957, he has his first nervous breakdown in 1961 and is saved by a woman he had casually met at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Marie de Verneuil with whom he travels to Marienbad in 1972 echoing a visit he had made there with his parents and Vera in 1938 (ala Nabokov’s Luzhin in The Defense).  Austerlitz returns to London in 1961 where he teaches until he retires in 1991.  In 1992 he visits Prague and finds Vera, learning that his mother Agata had been sent to Terezin which he also visits and finds deserted.  Another breakdown follows and hospitalization in London’s St. Clement’s.  He returns to Paris in 1997 to search for his father who had also been sent to the East.  All of this is told to a narrator who had been born in 1946 and had lived in Germany for 20 years and then again.  The narrator and Austerlitz met by chance in Antwerp at the railroad station and again by chance in Leige and Brussels and 30 years later at the Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Station where Austerlitz has memories of arriving with the Kindertransport.  The novel ends with the narrator reading a book given to him by Austerlitz and written by a South African Jew who had tried to find his grandfather’s traces in Lithuania where he had died before WWI.  This death resulted in that family moving to S Africa and avoiding the Holocaust.  A moving and beautiful work.