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  • Published: 6 August 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784875350
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

The Rings of Saturn

(Vintage Voyages)




VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot.

What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.

VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

  • Published: 6 August 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784875350
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

Other books in the series

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.

Also by W.G. Sebald

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Praise for The Rings of Saturn

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