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 *
Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century * The Times *