In the dark hold of the Antwerp station — thus begins the narrator’s story — there was a young man, blond, wearing heavy hiking boots, blue work trousers, and an old backpack, intensely occupied with taking notes and making drawings in a notebook.

The narrator watches him fascinated and then begins a relationship that unfolds over decades. The enigmatic foreigner is named Jacques Austerlitz. He has lived in London for many years but is not English.

In the 1940s, as a Jewish refugee child, he arrived in Wales and was raised in the home of the parish priest of a small village, with the preacher and his wife, elderly and sorrowful people. The boy grows up lonely, and when he learns his true origin and real name, he also understands why he feels like a stranger among men.

Sebald gathers in this book the story of a disturbed, uprooted being. He searches the past, which is relived once again in the dense language of one of the most important and original narrators of our time.