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Biographical note
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.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
It's like nothing I've ever read...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. I know of few books written in our time but this one which attains the sublime
Susan Sontag, Times Literary Supplement
The writing seems long distilled, intensely pre-mediated and yet utterly fresh. It has an unaffected earnestness, a loner's earnestness
Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
One of the most innovative writers of the late 20th century... It's as if the spirit of ruined Europe were speaking through him
Guardian
The writer who above all others transformed the ravaged lands and minds of post-war Europe into a scene of hauntings
Independent
'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 émigrés 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
At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century.