Description

‘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

Publisher Review

"Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century" * The Times * "Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald" * New York Times * "The finest book of long-distance mental travel that I've ever read" * Jonathan Raban, Times Literary Supplement * "A desperate intensity of feeling is thrillingly counterpoised by the workings of a wonderfully learned and rigorous mind" * Sunday Times * "A great, strange and moving work" * James Wood, Guardian *