Vertigo

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.

‘Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed’ Anita Brookner, Spectator

What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona? Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of Sebald’s compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself.

‘As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell… [Sebald] entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires’ Robert McCrum, Observer

Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressedWhere has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and precision, so direct in its expression of feeling, yet so respectfully devoted to "the real"?Possessed of a richness and strangeness that would put most other writers to shame. Sebald's journey into himself and his past is compelling, puzzling, uniqueAs a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell.it works triumphantly well. The fact that W.G. Sebald chooses to tease, dazzle and mystify should not blind us to the fact that he does the one thing that every novelist should do: he entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires