W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity. This tenth-anniversary edition features a new Introduction by James Wood.

IN AUGUST 1805, Napoleon abandoned his plans for the invasion of Britain and diverted his army to the Danube Valley to confront Austrian and Russian forces in a bid for control of central Europe. The campaign culminated with the Battle of Austerlitz, regarded by many as Napoleon’s greatest triumph, whose far-reaching effects paved the way for French hegemony on the Continent for the next decade. In this concise volume, acclaimed military historian Gregory Fremont-Barnes uses detailed profiles to explore the leaders, tactics and weaponry of the clashing French, Austrian and Russian forces. Packed with fact boxes, maps and more, Napoleon’s Greatest Triumph is the perfect way to explore this important battle and the rise of Napoleon’s reputation as a supreme military leader.

This in-depth study of The Battle of Austerlitz, considered Napoleon’s greatest victory, won the Napoleon Foundation’s History Grand Prize. Sometimes called The Battle of Three Emperors, Napoleon’s victory against the combined forces of Russia and Austria brought a decisive end to The War of the Third Coalition. The magnitude of the French achievement against a larger army was met by sheer amazement and delirium in Paris, where just days earlier the nation had been teetering on the brink of financial collapse. In 1805: Austerlitz, historian Robert Goetz demonstrates how Napoleon and his Grande Armée of 1805 defeated a formidable professional army that had fought the French armies on equal terms five years earlier. Goetz analyses the planning of the opposing forces and details the course of the battle hour by hour, describing the fierce see-saw battle around Sokolnitz, the epic struggle for the Pratzen Heights, the dramatic engagement between the legendary Lannes and Bagration in the north, and the widely misunderstood clash of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and Alexander’s Imperial Leib-Guard. Goetz’s detailed and balanced assessment of the battle exposes many myths that have been perpetuated and even embellished in other accounts.

A London Sunday Times Book of the Year A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year Alistair Horne explores the theme of military success and failure in How Far From Austerlitz? chronicling Napoleon's rise and fall, drawing parallels with other great leaders of the modern era. The Battle of Austerlitz was Napoleon's greatest victory, the culmination of one of the greatest military campaigns of all time. It was also the last battle the "Father of Modern Warfare" would leave in absolute triumph, for, though he did not know it, Austerlitz marked the beginning of Napoleon's downfall. His triumph was too complete and his conquest too brutal to last. Like Hitler, he came to believe he was invincible, that no force could halt his bloody march across Europe. Like Hitler, he paid dearly for his hubris, climaxing in bitter defeat at Waterloo in 1815. In a matter of years, he had fallen from grace.

Austerlitz again? Yes, Austerlitz again! By now everything has been said and told about that famous battle of December, 2, 1805, which represents one of the zenith of Bonaparte’s “genius”. The battle of Austerlitz has been emphasized as the battle of the Three Emperors, the last of which, considered in Europe a “parvenu”, was Napoleon himself. It was one of the battles that had the honor of giving its name to one of the most important railway stations in Paris, Gare de Austerlitz, as well as giving its name to a bridge over the Seine, opened in 1807, iron and toll. Already these trivial considerations are reality witnesses of how the new emperor was pleased with the Campaign of 1805 and its final outcome.