The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austria and America. The narrator literally follows their footsteps, studding each story with photographs and creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album. But gradually, Sebald's prose, which combines documentary description with almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts a new magic, and the four stories merge into one. (From New Directions)

W.G. Sebald was a German writer. His books, including The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo and Austerlitz, have won a number of international awards. He died in 2001 at the age of 57.