The Emigrants

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. <p><b>'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 </b><br><br>At first <i>The Emigrants</i> 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.<br><br><b>'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' <i>Spectator</i></b></p> Strange beautiful and terribly moving This deeply moving book shames most writers with its nerve and tact and wonder An unconsoling masterpiece...It is exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art A spellbinding account of four Jewish exiles. Its restrained and meditative tone has stayed with me all year 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 <p><b>'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 </b><br><br>At first <i>The Emigrants</i> 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.<br><br><b>'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' <i>Spectator</i></b></p>