A great, strange and moving work' James Wood, Guardian
A Walking tour through the haunted landscapes of the past, in the company of the exiled and the departed.The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a book unlike any other in contemporary literature, an intricately patterned and endlessly thought-provoking meditation on the transience of all things human.
Author ProfileW. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001.
ReviewsA great, strange and moving work,The finest book of long-distance mental travel that I've ever read,A desperate intensity of feeling is thrillingly counterpoised by the workings of a wonderfully learned and rigorous mind,Sebald is surely a major European author...he reaches the heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust,A highly original work...part memoir, part fiction, part meditative essay writing, and finally an essay for the dispossessed,Sebald's exquisitely written philosophical tramp around East Anglia has you asking questions about truth, art and history at every turn of his mysterious path. What's never in doubt is the strength of Sebald's vision or the beauty of his prose,This wonderfully erudite book
