Author(s): W. G. Sebald; Michael Hulse (Translator)

Fiction | Tim's picks

'Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century' 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

FULLERS REVIEW — TIM

Is there anything in world literature to rival the haunting melodies of Sebald’s prose? There’s something particularly pleasing about the aimless and episodic nature of The Rings of Saturn, in which he walks morosely from place to place and meditates on history, destruction and decay. Once you’ve adjusted to his melancholy rhythms his books are hypnotic.