The Rings of Saturn

A record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia.|W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu Germany 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 and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and the author of The Emigrants which won a series of major awards including the Berlin Literature Prize the Heinrich Böll Prize the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Joseph Breitbach Prize; The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. W.G. Sebald wrote in his native tongue German and worked closely with his translator Michael Hulse to translate his work into English. He died in December 2001.Michael Hulse has translated Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Jacob Wasserman's Caspar Hauser as well as the contemporary German authors Luise Rinser Botho Strauss and Elfriede Jelinek. He is also an award-winning poet. He lives in Amsterdam.|‘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|A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?) and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears|A 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