The Rings of Saturn
  • Published: 30 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446420874
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

The Rings of Saturn

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Jan 2003
EBook
30 Nov 2013
Paperback
6 Aug 2019
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A new, modern look for Sebald's classic trilogy of books - Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn - 20 years after the tragic death of one of our most pioneering and cherished writers

‘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
  • Published: 30 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446420874
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

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
Silent Catastrophes
Vertigo
See all

Praise for The Rings of Saturn

A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. 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

A great, strange and moving work

James Wood, Guardian

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

Sebald is surely a major European author...he reaches the heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust

Independent on Sunday

A highly original work...part memoir, part fiction, part meditative essay writing, and finally an essay for the dispossessed

Sunday Telegraph

Sebald's exquisitely written philosophical tramp around East Anglia has you asking questions about truth, art and history at every turn of his mysterious path. What's never in doubt is the strength of Sebald's vision or the beauty of his prose

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Merges history, geography, memory and philosophy to create something more mood than story – nostalgic, melancholy and wondrous

Time Out

This spellbinding book changed for ever my idea of what a memoir could be

Laura Cumming, author of ON CHAPEL SANDS, Week

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

Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century

The Times