Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century
The Times

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
New York Times

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

A great, strange and moving work
James Wood, Guardian

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

Gareth Evans 10 January 2011

To say this book inspires strong allegiances would be an understatement. Among its many high profile admirers – Robert Macfarlane, Rick Moody, Andrew Motion, Iain Sinclair – it operates as a kind of talisman, a call to benign arms for the possibilities of the word in an overwhelmingly visual age. To précis it here would be redundant, suffice to say it is primarily a book, not a novel or memoir, travelogue or biography, but rather a hybrid of all: a unique journey on foot through history, ideas and landscape, specifically that of coastal Suffolk. Written in a hypnotically digressive labyrinthine style, it is the most influential work of a writer who died tragically in his early 50s, within only a few years of first publishing, and with the Nobel prize firmly in his sights. Interestingly, the first film about Sebald and the book, Patience (After Sebald), premieres early in 2011 (www.artevents.info).