A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia, author W.G. Sebald's home for more than 20 years, THE RINGS OF SATURN explores Britain's pastoral and imperial past. On the pilgrimage a company of ghosts, like conductors between the past and present, keep us company. As Sebald catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds, the mesmerized reader is led along, viewing with him survival and memories, change and oblivion.

The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII.

Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation.