The Emigrants

The four long narratives in appear at first to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of Jewish exiles and émigrés in our calamitous century. Following (quite literally) in their footsteps, the narrator traces routes which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople and Jerusalem. Each story is studded with photographs, creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album, trying to tease out the separate truths behind the fading images. But gradually, as Sebald's prose, which ranges the borderland between documentary description and almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts its powerful magic, the stories merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.

Winner of the Berlin Literature Prize.