Anthea Bell

These sixteen moving essays contain Sebald's trademark themes--the power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the existence of ghosts in both places and artifacts. Four essays pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present on the Mediterranean isle. In "A Little Excursion to Ajaccio," Sebald visits the birthplace of Napoleon and muses on the hints of a great man's future in his...

It's the night before the feast in the village of Furstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman - he's dead. And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells - the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit...

a whole family has been murdered with a pickaxe. They were old Danner the farmer, an overbearing patriarch; his put-upon devoutly religious wife; and their daughter Barbara Spangler, whose husband Vincenz left her after fathering her daughter little Marianne. She also had a son, two-year-old Josef, the result of her affair with local farmer Georg Hauer after his wife's death from cancer. Hauer himself claimed paternity. Also murdered was the Danners'...

"Austerlitz is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left...

While on their way to Bremen, four aging animals who are no longer of any use to their masters find a new home after outwitting a gang of robbers.