I want to talk about the specific experience of reading W.G. Sebald. His four major prose works — Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz — operate in a mode that I can't precisely describe. They're not novels, exactly. They're not memoir. They're not travelogue. They're investigations of memory and loss and the way the past persists in landscape and architecture and human faces.

Sebald interspersed his prose with photographs — blurry, uncaptioned, ambiguous — that are either documentation or fabrication and he never specified which. The effect is to make the reader uncertain about what is real, which is appropriate to a body of work that is about how we construct the past from fragmentary evidence.

The Rings of Saturn is the one I'd start with. It's structured as a walk along the Suffolk coast and is formally the most accessible of his books. By the end it has become something else entirely.