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A Place in the Country
  • Published: 28 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141037011
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99

A Place in the Country

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EBook
2 May 2013
Paperback
28 May 2014
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Fusing biography and essay, A Place in the Country is a window into the brilliant mind of W. G. Sebald

When W. G. Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jan Peter Tripp.

Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place - as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration - Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice.

A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved and much missed writer.
  • Published: 28 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141037011
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

W. G. Sebald

W G Sebald (Author)
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, 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, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001.

Michael Hulse and Simon Rae (Translators)
Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. He is based in Warwick. Simon Rae is a playwright , novelist and broadcaster (he presented Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' for several years). He lives in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Both Michael Hulse and Simon Rae are published poets and winners of the National Poetry Competition.

portrait photo of W. G. Sebald

Also by W. G. Sebald

The Emigrants
The Rings of Saturn
Silent Catastrophes
The Emergence of Memory
Across the Land and the Water
Austerlitz
Austerlitz
See all

Praise for A Place in the Country

A fascinating volume that confirms Sebald as one of Europe's most mysterious and best-loved literary imaginations

Evening Standard

Sebald was in possession of the uncanny ability to make his own intellectual obsessions, immediately, compulsively his reader's

Observer

Shows a writer at his most inquisitive, gazing deeply under the surface of things

Financial Times

Irresistible . . . an intimate anatomy of the pathos, absurdity and perverse splendour of trying to find patterns in the chaos of the world

Independent

Erudite, truthful, moving

The Times

A beautiful book . . . about the crazy quest for meaning, and how we persist with it despite the shadows that slide towards us

Joanna Kavenna, Spectator