"Ostensiblya record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," asRobert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings ofSaturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England'simperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay.. . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might sayhypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or morecompelling work." The Rings of Saturn - with its curiousarchive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well ascountryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabitingtumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson,"the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Templeof Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massivebombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connectssugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the BelgianCongo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridgeover the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and thesilk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historicalsweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." TheEmigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfectwhile being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one ofthe great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted:"and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strangea triumph." Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

As he did so brilliantly in The Emigrants, German author Sebald once again blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in this meditative work. Sebald's unnamed, traveling narrator is making his way through the county of Suffolk, England, and from there back in time. We learn that he has recently been hospitalized, an event that "marked the beginning of a fissure that has since riven my life." Sunk in his own thoughts, he becomes obsessed with the ubiquitous evidence of disintegration he views in the landscape and history of the small coastal towns, from the moribund herring industry to the lost art of silk production. He spirals deeper into his own considerably learned historical memory to explore, for example, slavery, the Chinese opium wars, Joseph Conrad's life on the high seas and Chateaubriand's memories of estranged love. It comes as no surprise that the "parlous loftiness" of the 17th-century metaphysician Thomas Browne holds particular fascination for our narrator who, like Browne, writes "out of the fullness of his erudition," pursuing his train of thought in sentences "that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness." Numerous photographs that illustrate the people, places and objects discussed in the text add to the curious beauty of this brooding, elegiac novel. (May) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. He has taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England since 1970. He became a professor of European literature in 1987. From 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He was born in Wertach in Allgau, Germany in 1944. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.