Description

The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft 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 rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, and an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.

‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The Times

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 *