A Place in the Country

'The greatest writer of our time' Peter Carey When W. G. Sebald 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 fascinating volume that confirms Sebald as one of Europe's most mysterious and best-loved literary imaginations' Evening Standard 'Sebald was in possession of the uncanny ability to make his own intellectual obsessions, immediately, compulsively his reader's' Observer 'Irresistible . . . an intimate anatomy of the pathos, absurdity and perverse splendour of trying to find patterns in the chaos of the world' Independent