Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of this compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsman and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona?

In the last years of World War II, the Allies dropped a million bombs on Germany. Yet the German people have been silent about the resulting devestation and loss of life, failing to recognise the terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land. Here W.G. Sebald asks why it is we turn our backs on the horrors of war, and in addressing our response to the past, offers insights into how we live now.