The Rings of Saturn

W. G. Sebald sets out on foot through East Anglia and finds that every road seems to lead deeper into memory.

Beginning with a journey along the Suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Bungay, The Rings of Saturn moves far beyond conventional travel writing. Estates, ruined landscapes, fishing fleets and coastal towns become points of departure for reflections on writers, empires, violence, natural history and the transience of human life.

Sebald's first-person journey draws figures including Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad and François-René de Chateaubriand into an intricate pattern of association. Local observation repeatedly widens into histories of exile, colonialism, destruction and mourning, then returns to the quiet English landscape through which the narrator walks.

For readers of literary travel writing, essayistic fiction and meditations on memory and history, The Rings of Saturn offers an unusual reading experience: digressive, erudite and deeply atmospheric, with Suffolk's eroding coast holding together a world of vanished people and cultures.