Sebald is a thrilling, original writer. He makes narration a state of investigative bliss.--W. S. Di Piero "The New York Times Book Review"

One of contemporary literature's most transformative figures: utterly unique. His books combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography in the crucible of his haunting prose style to create a strange new literary compound. Susan Sontag, in a 2000 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, asked whether 'literary greatness [was] still possible'. She concluded that 'one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.' The books are fascinating for the way they inhabit their own self-determined genre, but that's not ultimately why they are essential reading. There is a moral magnitude and a weary, melancholy wisdom in Sebald's writing that transcends the literary and attains something like an oracular register. Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream.-- "The New Yorker"