From acclaimed critic, novelist and academic W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, a collection of essay on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him – appearing for the first time in English

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighbouring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as ‘home/land’, ‘borderland’ and ‘exile’ occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude.

‘A writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity’ Guardian

‘Sebald was probably the greatest intellect and voice of the late twentieth century’ Antony Beevor, The Times

What 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

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

‘Mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

‘Greatness in literature is still possible’ John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year

‘A work of obvious genius’ Literary Review

‘A fusion of the mystical and the solid … His art is a form of justice – there can be, I think, no higher aim’ Evening Standard

‘Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art’ The Times Literary Supplement

‘I have never read a book that provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis’ Observer

‘A great book by a great writer’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 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 is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

At first The Emigrants appears simply to document 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.

‘An unconsoling masterpiece… Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated…a true work of art’ Spectator