Reading List

Authors Like W. G. Sebald

Q: Which W. G. Sebald book should I read first?

The Emigrants (1992; English 1996), four lives of exile told in four parts, or Austerlitz (2001), whose English translation won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2002.

Q: Does W. G. Sebald have a new book?

He died in December 2001. Silent Catastrophes (2025) is the first English edition of two essay collections he published in German in 1985 and 1991.

Q: What should I read after Austerlitz?

Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) and Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986).

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, in May 1944, while his father was serving in the Wehrmacht; his father did not come home from a prisoner-of-war camp until 1947. Sebald, who preferred to be called Max, moved to Manchester to teach in 1966, settled in Norfolk, spent three decades at the University of East Anglia, and wrote all his books in German. They set blurred black-and-white photographs beside the text rather than illustrating it, and one sentence in Austerlitz (2001) runs for nine pages. The Rings of Saturn (1995), a walk through Suffolk, keeps returning to the seventeenth-century Norwich doctor Thomas Browne, down to the fate of his skull. Sebald died in December 2001, aged 57, after a heart attack at the wheel near Norwich. The ten writers below share his method: walking, remembering, and following one life until it opens onto a whole century.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memory and exile · Prose with photographs · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love W. G. Sebald, start with Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century Norwich physician whose life and writings run through The Rings of Saturn, and Patrick Modiano, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for what the Swedish Academy called ‘the art of memory’. For the walking narrator, read Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). Below are seven more, from a Swiss writer found dead in the snow to the poet-translator who appears in Sebald’s Suffolk walk.

10 authors like W. G. Sebald

The ghost in Suffolk

Thomas Browne

English · Religio Medici (1643), Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Urne-Buriall (1658)

Browne (1605–1682) practised medicine in Norwich from 1637 until his death. His prose meditations range from his own faith in Religio Medici to common errors in Pseudodoxia Epidemica and burial customs in Urne-Buriall. In 1840 workmen opened his coffin and removed his skull, which was not reburied until 1922. In 1662 his testimony at a witch trial in Bury St Edmunds may have influenced the jury that convicted two women.

Sebald’s long, digressive sentences and his fascination with decay and the dead go straight back to Browne. Read Urne-Buriall after The Rings of Saturn to hear where the music of the book comes from.

— Lisanne

The solitary walker

Robert Walser

Swiss · The Assistant (1908), Jakob von Gunten (1909), The Walk (1917)

Walser (1878–1956) was born in Biel and wrote in German. He drafted much of his later work in tiny pencil handwriting, the ‘microscripts’, deciphered only between 1985 and 2000. Moved against his will to the asylum at Herisau in 1933, he stopped publishing, and on Christmas Day 1956 he was found dead in the snow near the asylum. Sebald wrote an essay about him, “Le Promeneur Solitaire”.

Walser is the walker behind Sebald’s walkers: modest, observant narrators who drift through a landscape and let small things lead them somewhere unexpected. The Walk is the place to begin.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robert Walser →

Sentences without end

Thomas Bernhard

Austrian · Correction (1975), Woodcutters (1984), Extinction (1986)

Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote many of his novels as a single unbroken block of long sentences, with no paragraph or chapter breaks. He attacked Austria’s antisemitism and its denial of the Nazi past; his last play, Heldenplatz (1988), opened under police guard. His will tried to forbid publication and performance of his work in Austria.

Bernhard and Sebald both wrote German prose in long, rhythmic sentences that relay another person’s talk, and both looked hard at what their countries would not remember. Bernhard is furious and comic where Sebald is quiet; read Extinction for the contrast.

— Lisanne

The friend in the book

Michael Hamburger

German-British · A Mug’s Game (1973), Collected Poems 1941–1994 (1995)

Hamburger (1924–2007) was born in Berlin to a Jewish family that left for Britain in 1933. He translated Hölderlin and Paul Celan, and later Sebald’s own poems, After Nature (2002) and Unrecounted (2004). He lived in Middleton, Suffolk, and appears as himself in The Rings of Saturn.

Hamburger is a real emigrant in Sebald’s pages, and his own memoir and poems tell the story of a German childhood lost in 1933 that Sebald kept circling. Read him for the life behind one of the book’s quietest chapters.

— Lisanne

Testimony, not reconstruction

Primo Levi

Italian · If This Is a Man (1947), The Periodic Table (1975), The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Levi (1919–1987) was a chemist from Turin who survived a year as a prisoner in Auschwitz and described it in If This Is a Man, published in the US as Survival in Auschwitz. The Periodic Table tells his life in stories named after chemical elements, and The Drowned and the Saved asks why people behaved as they did in the camps.

Levi complicates Sebald. Levi wrote as a survivor, testifying to what he saw; Sebald, a non-Jewish German born in 1944, reconstructed other people’s losses and mixed fact with invention. Reading them together raises the question of who may tell whose story.

— Lisanne

The art of memory

Patrick Modiano

French · Missing Person (1978), Dora Bruder (1997)

Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1945. Rue des Boutiques obscures, translated as Missing Person, won the Prix Goncourt. In 2014 he received the Nobel Prize for ‘the art of memory’ with which he evokes elusive human destinies and the life-world of the Occupation. His novel La Danseuse appeared in English as Ballerina in 2025.

Modiano’s narrators, like Sebald’s, search archives, addresses and old photographs for people the century erased, and accept that much will stay lost. Read Dora Bruder after Austerlitz.

— Lisanne

A river through Europe

Claudio Magris

Italian · Danube (1986), Microcosms (1997), Blameless (2015)

Magris was born in Trieste in 1939 and coined the term ‘Habsburg myth’ in 1963 in a study of modern Austrian literature. Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea won the Bagutta Prize, and Microcosms won the Strega Prize in 1997.

Magris writes the same hybrid as Sebald: a journey that becomes essay, history and elegy for a vanished Central Europe. Suits readers who loved the travelling half of Vertigo.

— Lisanne

German history, one house

Jenny Erpenbeck

German · Visitation (2008), Go, Went, Gone (2015), Kairos (2021)

Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. The End of Days won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015, shared with her translator Susan Bernofsky, and Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, won the International Booker Prize in 2024, the first novel written in German to do so.

Erpenbeck, like Sebald, writes German history through the people it displaced and the places that outlast them. Visitation follows a single house and its owners across the century; suits readers of The Emigrants.

— Lisanne

Fragments, journeys, bodies

Olga Tokarczuk

Polish · Flights (2007), The Books of Jacob (2014)

Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów in 1962. Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, and she received the Nobel Prize for 2018 for ‘a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life’. After The Books of Jacob she faced a hostile campaign from Polish nationalists.

Flights is built like a Sebald book: travel notes, short histories and digressions that circle a few obsessions until they connect. Suits readers who loved the wandering structure of The Rings of Saturn.

— Lisanne

Every book by Olga Tokarczuk →

A walker in New York

Teju Cole

Nigerian-American · Open City (2011), Known and Strange Things (2016), Tremor (2023)

Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1975 to Nigerian parents. Open City follows Julius, a Nigerian immigrant and psychiatry student, as he walks through Manhattan and lets its history and his own past rise up around him. Cole is also a photographer, and wrote the ‘On Photography’ column for The New York Times Magazine.

Open City is the clearest twenty-first-century heir to Sebald’s method: a walking, reflective narrator, and a city read as layers of other people’s suffering. Cole’s photographer’s eye completes the link.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved W. G. Sebald

If you loved The Rings of Saturn, read Thomas Browne.

Urne-Buriall (1658): a short meditation on burial and oblivion by the doctor Sebald kept returning to.

If you loved Austerlitz, read Patrick Modiano.

Dora Bruder (1997): a writer searching for a life the Occupation erased.

If you loved The Emigrants, read Primo Levi.

If This Is a Man (1947): the testimony that sits behind so much later fiction.

If you want the walk itself, read Robert Walser.

The Walk (1917): the novella that was the first of his work to appear in English.

If you want more W. G. Sebald, go back to the start.

Read Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), then the essays On the Natural History of Destruction (1999).

Frequently asked questions about authors like W. G. Sebald

Who writes like W. G. Sebald?

Thomas Browne, Patrick Modiano and Teju Cole are the closest matches; in German, Thomas Bernhard and Jenny Erpenbeck.

Which W. G. Sebald book should I read first?

The Emigrants (1992; English 1996), four lives of exile told in four parts, or Austerlitz (2001), whose English translation won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2002.

Does W. G. Sebald have a new book?

He died in December 2001. Silent Catastrophes (2025) is the first English edition of two essay collections he published in German in 1985 and 1991.

Are W. G. Sebald’s books true?

They mix fact, memory and fiction. Carole Angier’s biography Speak, Silence (2021) found that some people behind his characters objected: Susi Bechhöfer, whose story fed Austerlitz, felt cheated, and the painter Frank Auerbach found The Emigrants repellent.

What should I read after Austerlitz?

Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) and Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986).

Is W. G. Sebald like Thomas Bernhard?

Both wrote in German in long, rhythmic sentences and confronted what their countries would not remember, but Bernhard is furious and comic and Sebald is quiet and melancholy.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like W. G. Sebald

10 authors like W. G. Sebald

Thomas Browne

Robert Walser

Thomas Bernhard

Michael Hamburger

Primo Levi

Patrick Modiano

Claudio Magris

Jenny Erpenbeck

Olga Tokarczuk

Teju Cole

Where to start if you loved W. G. Sebald

Frequently asked questions about authors like W. G. Sebald

Who writes like W. G. Sebald?

Which W. G. Sebald book should I read first?

Does W. G. Sebald have a new book?

Are W. G. Sebald’s books true?

What should I read after Austerlitz?

Is W. G. Sebald like Thomas Bernhard?

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