"The Age of Wonders," the second of Mr. Appelfeld's books to be published in English, deals with a [subject similar to that of his first book, "Badenheim 1939"]—the story of a Jewish intellectual and his family clinging to their Austrian homeland in the very teeth of the "Final Solution"—but the manner of the telling, especially in the first of the book's two parts, is unrelentingly tragic, and this is accomplished with an artistry I found more affecting than "Badenheim's" eerie comedy and graceful concision. (p. 1)

[In Book One there are] many desolate epiphanies, fathomless little pools of sorrow that open up here and there in the steady flow of the narrative with cumulative tragic force: "My sleep that night was strange: I had lost everyone and retreated into myself as into the silence of high-growing reeds."…

[A plot] synopsis provides just the spine of Book One...