Collection: W.G Sebald Selection

The publication of The Emigrants in 1996 was responsible for W.G Sebald’s introduction to the English-speaking world. A melding of fiction and memoir, punctuated by a variety of eerie black and white photographs, the novel defied all expectations of narrative convention. This particular inscribed edition of a novel described by Susan Sontag as being "perfect whilst being unlike any book one has ever read", is very scarcely found with a signature. Our first edition copy of Vertigo, the first novel by Sebald, is signed by the author and another such example of seamless genre blending. A multifaceted masterpiece, it merges together the stories of Stendhal's unrequited love, the trials of Franz Kafka in Italy and Casonova's imprisonment alongside Sebald's return to his Bavarian childhood village.

In our signed copy of the famous The Rings of Saturn, Sebald transforms a fictional walk through coastal East Anglia into a moving tangential novel which reads both as literary prose, autobiography and history simultaneously. Not only does Sebald digress physically but he embarks on discussions into history and the history of literature itself. This signed edition of a modern classic continues to prove itself as a masterpiece in the blurring of lines; a book as elusive as the rings of saturn themselves.

“All great literature either dissolves a genre or invents one” said Walter Benjamin and Sebald also employed photography as its own vocabulary within his writing. His 35mm point and shoot camera, set to automatic, was an integral aspect of the process; the enigmatic photographs serve as breaks in between the tangential narrative and compelling lyricism. As For Years Now, Sebald’s collaboration with the artist Tess Jerry, in which 23 short poems are paired with corresponding illustration, demonstrates; his work transcends one form alone and he was deeply engaged in the publication of his images which makes their impact all the more profound.

The first of Sebald's non-fiction books to be translated to English, the original German title of On The Natural History of Destruction was Luftkrieg und Literatur, (”Air War and Literature”) and it examines the psychological aftermath of the bombings by Allied Forces- raising the pertinent question of why such trauma has been left absent from collective memory. He describes this as a sinister societal amnesia. The formidable book consists of a variety of essays about literature and writers, a conduit through which Sebald analyses the German processing of WWII

Sebald would tragically die in a car crash, the consequence of an aneurysm, when he was on the rumoured precipice of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Geoff Dyer would write in the aftermath; “The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald’s books is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote—as was often remarked—like a ghost. He was one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt exhumed from the nineteenth”.