Austerlitz

Austerlitz is W. G. Sebald's haunting novel of post-war Europe. 
 
In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before. Austerlitz is W.G. Sebald's melancholic masterpiece. 
 
'Mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times 
 
'Greatness in literature is still possible' John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year 
 
'A work of obvious genius' Literary Review 
 
'A fusion of the mystical and the solid ... His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher aim' Evening Standard 
 
'Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'I have never read a book that provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis' Observer 
 
'A great book by a great writer' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 
 
W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

A work of obvious genius and an extraordinary writer way above most of his contemporaries

Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald

His tale of one man's odyssey through the dark ages of European history is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world. Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st century

W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

A Place in the Country

A Place in the Country is a window into the brilliant mind of W. G. Sebald 
 
'The greatest writer of our time' Peter Carey 
 
When W. G. Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jan Peter Tripp. 
 
Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place - as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration - Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice. 
 
'A fascinating volume that confirms Sebald as one of Europe's most mysterious and best-loved literary imaginations' Evening Standard 
 
'Sebald was in possession of the uncanny ability to make his own intellectual obsessions, immediately, compulsively his reader's' Observer 
 
'Irresistible . . . an intimate anatomy of the pathos, absurdity and perverse splendour of trying to find patterns in the chaos of the world' Independent 
 
W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted and a selection of poetry, Across the Land and the Water. 
 
Jo Catling taught German for a number of years alongside W. G. Sebald at the University of East Anglia, where she is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.

A fascinating volume that confirms Sebald as one of Europe's most mysterious and best-loved literary imaginations

Sebald was in possession of the uncanny ability to make his own intellectual obsessions,  immediately, compulsively his reader's

Shows a writer at his most inquisitive, gazing deeply under the surface of things

Irresistible . . . an intimate anatomy of the pathos, absurdity and perverse splendour of trying to find patterns in the chaos of the world

A beautiful book . . . about the crazy quest for meaning, and how we persist with it despite the shadows that slide towards us

When W. G. Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jan Peter Tripp. 
 
Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place - as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration - Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice. 
 
A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved and much missed writer.

Selected Poems 1964-2001

Across the Land and the Water

A stunningly beautiful selection of poetry by W. G. Sebald. 
 
'The greatest writer of our time' Peter Carey 
 
Across the Land and the Water brings together poems from throughout W. G. Sebald's life as well as additional works found after his death. Arranged chronologically, from his student days in the 1960s to the longer narratives he worked on in the 1980s, these poems are suffused by the themes which dominated Sebald's books. Here you will find subtle vignettes on nature and history, death and memory, journeys and landscapes, each short piece filled with insight, sensitivity and brilliance. 
 
'An important book . . . full of things that are beautiful and fascinating' Andrew Motion, Guardian 
 
'When you read Sebald you are transported to another realm. Reading him is a truly sublime experience' Literary Review 
 
'Gracefully unsettling. The poems invest every landscape with an archaeologist's sense of the pain, toil and loss secreted in each layer of soil' Independent 
 
'One of the most important writers of our time' A. S. Byatt 
 
'Delightful' Economist 
 
'Show a humane and complex intelligence and deserve a place next to Sebald's prose output' New Statesman 
 
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, A Place in the Country.

W.G. Sebald is one of very few German writers of the last few decades to have attracted both a broad readership in the UK and an international following of journalists and scholars alike. He has proved a huge inspiration not just to younger writers but also to artists and photographers fascinated by the use of imagery and images in his work. His books include Austerlitz, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and After Nature. 
 
Iain Galbraith is a widely published translator of German into English. He won the John Dryden Prize for Literary Translation in 2004.

Across the Land and the Water brings together poems from throughout W. G. Sebald's life as well as additional works found after his death. Arranged chronologically, from his student days in the 1960s to the longer narratives he worked on in the 1980s, these poems are suffused by the themes which dominated Sebald's books. Here you will find subtle vignettes on nature and history, death and memory, journeys and landscapes, each short piece filled with insight, sensitivity and brilliance.

Campo Santo

A brilliant collection of pieces written by W.G. Sebald over the twenty years before his death in 2001.

Campo Santo is a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald 
 
When W.G. Sebald died tragically in 2001 a unique voice was silenced. Campo Santo is a collection of the pieces he left behind - none of them previously published in book form - which provide a powerful insight into the themes that came to dominate his life. 
 
Four pieces pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present. Sebald also examines the works of writers such as Kafka, Nabokov, and Günter Grass, showing both how literature can provide restitution for the injustices of the world and how such literature came to have so great an influence on him. Campo Santo is a fitting memorial to W.G. Sebald, who himself studied the shifting nature of memory and time with such sensitivity. 
 
'A precious addition to the canon' Independent 
 
'Will come to be seen as indispensable to an understanding of his work' Sunday Times 
 
'Full of a sense of liberation and lightness ... these [pieces] abound in energy and work the authentic Sebaldian magic' Literary Review 
 
'We have become suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in Sebald's case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is, the real thing' John Banville, Guardian 
 
'Sebald was probably the greatest intellect and voice of the late twentieth century' Anthony Beevor, The Times 
 
'A writer whose explorations of time and memory make him arguably the closest author modern European letters has to rival Borges' Sunday Times 
 
 
W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, For Years Now and A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

Sebald's final collection of essays provides a powerful insight into the themes that came to dominate his life. Four pieces pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present. Sebald also examines the works of writers such as Günter Grass, Bruce Chatwin and Kafka, showing both how literature can provide restitution for the injustices of the world and how such literature came to have so great an influence on him.

Unrecounted

A book of poems and images from one of our most admired European writers, W. G. Sebald, and his friend and collaborator, the German artist Jan Peter Tripp.

Unrecounted is a book of poems and images from one of the most admired European writers, W.G. Sebald, and his friend and collaborator, the German artist Jan Peter Tripp. 
 
For a number of years until Sebald's death in 2001, the two exchanged poems and lithographs. Unrecounted is the startlingly original result of this long artistic friendship - a creative dialogue inspired by shared concerns. Tripp's lithographs, which portray pairs of eyes - among them those of Beckett, Borges, Proust - combine with W.G. Sebald's words in Unrecounted to speak of moments salvaged from time passing, of our eyes bearing witness, and of memory and remembrance. 
 
'Condenses Sebald's complex visual imagination to its poetic core' Scotland on Sunday 
 
'Elegiac, enhancing ... Sebald will not be forgotten' Time Out 
 
'A haunting testament to Sebald's singular and lasting vision' Observer 
 
'The magic of W.G. Sebald's incandescent body of work continues to unfold, with this unexpected collaboration' Susan Sontag 
 
'Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald' Daily Telegraph 
 
W.G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and settled permanently in England in 1970, where he was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia until his death in 2001. He is the author of four works of fiction: The Emigrants, which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize, and the Joseph Breitbach Prize; The Rings of Saturn; Vertigo; and Austerlitz, which was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Alongside this stand books of poetry For Years Now, After Nature, Unrecounted, and Across the Land and the Water, and the non-fiction books On the Natural History of Destruction and Campo Santo. Jan Peter Tripp was born in 1945 and lives and works in Alsace.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction and Campo Santo.  Jan Peter Tripp was born in 1945 and lives and works in Alsace.

For a number of years until his death in 2001, W. G. Sebald and the German artist Jan Peter Tripp exchanged poems and lithographs.  Unrecounted is the result of this long artistic friendship - a creative dialogue inspired by shared concerns. Sebald's words and Tripp's images speak of moments salvaged from time passing, of our eyes bearing witness, and of memory and remembrance.

On The Natural History Of Destruction

W. G. Sebald has become one of the most admired European writers

Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction explores German writers' silence about a moment of mass destruction 
 
In the last years of World War II, a million tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one hundred and thirty-one German towns and cities. Six hundred thousand civilians died, and three and a half million homes were destroyed. When it has cast such a very dark shadow over his life and work, Sebald asks, how have so many writers allowed themselves to write it out of their experience and avoid articulating the horror? W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction sparked a wide-ranging debate in the German press. 
 
'Sebald makes exquisite art out of vile history' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 
 
'One of the most important writers of our time' A.S. Byatt, New Statesman 
 
'Demands to be read for its grand emotional power ... it absorbs and horrifies and illuminates' Scotsman 
 
'Brilliant and disturbing' Antony Beevor, The Times 
 
 
W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, For Years Now and A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

In the last years of World War II, the Allies dropped a million tons of bombs on Germany.  Yet the German people have been silent about the resulting devastation and loss of life, failing to recognise the terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land. Here W. G. Sebald, one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, asks why it is we turn our backs on the horrors of war, and, in addressing our response to the past, bravely offers insights into how we live now.

W. G. Sebald

Jo Catling

A profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature . . . Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential writers of this generation . . . Nobody captures the epitaph quality of pastoral as well as he did

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature

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

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

Essays in Austrian Literature

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighbouring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as ‘home/land’, ‘borderland’ and ‘exile’ occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own. 
 
Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude.

W. G. Sebald

Praise for Silent Catastrophes

A profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature . . . Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential ...

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature

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

A profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature . . . Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential ...

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature

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

A profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature . . . Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential ...

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature

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

Books by W. G. Sebald

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter