The Emigrants

Description

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 'A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation... I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish emigres in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss. 'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' Spectator

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allg u, 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.

Strange, beautiful and terribly moving * A.S. Byatt * This deeply moving book shames most writers with its nerve and tact and wonder * Michael Ondaatje * An unconsoling masterpiece...It is exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art * Spectator * A spellbinding account of four Jewish exiles. Its restrained and meditative tone has stayed with me all year * Nicholas Shakespeare * A sober delicate account of displacement, and a classic of its kind. Modest and remote, it resurrects older standards of behaviour, making most contemporary writing seem brash and immature. No book has pleased me more this year * Anita Brookner, Spectator *