Modern Library Series

This is the real life story of Jacques Austerlitz who, at the age of five, came to London on one of the so-called kindertransports in the summer of 1939. Austerlitz is placed with foster parents in Wales, a childless couple who, for reasons of their own, erase in the boy all knowledge of his identity. Though he does, later on as an adult, have intimations of his otherness, Austerlitz, whose profession is that of an architectural historian, goes through life assiduously avoiding all clues that might point to his origins and to the fate of his true parents. It is only in his retirement that the past returns to haunt him and makes him explore what happened to him half a century ago, taking him back on a journey into the heart of Europe on the edge of war...the main locations of the book are Wales, London, Prague, various places in Belgium and Paris.

Across the Land and the Water

by W. G. Sebald

Published 3 November 2011

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.