W.G. Sebald – författare

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot.What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber are exiled across a shattered Europe.Set across Europe and America from the late nineteenth century through the aftermath of the Holocaust, The Emigrants reconstructs lives marked by displacement and loss.Through photographs discovered in drawers, half-remembered conversations and the slow reconstruction of letters and diaries, The Emigrants pieces together lives fractured by exile. Each man carries a private history of displacement, from pre-war Europe through the rise of Nazism and the shadow of the Holocaust, and each story circles loss that cannot be fully recovered. The narrator’s careful investigations reveal silences, evasions and the quiet weight of trauma that persists long after physical escape.At first The Emigrants simply documents the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.'I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' Spectator

‘Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed’ Anita Brookner, SpectatorWhat could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona? Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of Sebald’s compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself.‘As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell… [Sebald] entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires’ Robert McCrum, Observer

‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The TimesWhat begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.‘A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas… Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears’ Teju Cole, Guardian