A Place in the Country

From the author of the critically-acclaimed Austerlitz and Across the Land and Water comes A Place in the Country, the much anticipated translation of one of W.G. Sebald's most brilliant works.

When W. G. Sebald, the prize-winning author of Austerlitz, 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.

Praise for W.G. Sebald:

'A new kind of writing, combining fiction, memoir, travelogue, philosophy and much else besides . . . greatness in literature is still possible' John Banville, Irish Times

'When you read Sebald you are transported to another realm. Reading him is a truly sublime experience' Literary Review

'Is literary greatness still possible? One of the few answers available to English-Language readers is the work of W.G. Sebald' Susan Sontag


W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany 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, and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and the author of Austerlitz; The Emmigrants, which won a series of major awards, including the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Boll Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Joseph Breitbach Prize.