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Aldeburgh is a windswept fishing town on the east coast of the British Isles. “A bleak little place; not beautiful,” the novelist E. M. Forster called it. He went on: “It huddles around a flint-towered church and sprawls down to the North Sea—and what a wallop the sea makes as it pounds at the shingle! Near by is a quay, at the side of an estuary, and here the scenery becomes melancholy and flat; expanses of mud, saltish commons, the marsh-birds crying. ”

Some decades later, the great German writer W. G. Sebald fell even more deeply in love with the oblique charms of Aldeburgh and neighboring villages, and devoted his book The Rings of Saturn to the geography and history of the region. “I had not a single thought in my head,” Sebald wrote, describing one of his walks across the flats.

There are ruins all around Aldeburgh. At Dunwich, a few miles up the coast from Aldeburgh, an entire medieval town has slid into the sea. Around Orford, to the south, the landscape is dotted with relics of two world wars and the Cold War that followed—gun em-placements, designed to impede a Nazi invasion that never came; radar masts, employing the technology invented by researchers in nearby Bawdsey Manor; Atomic Weapons Establishment facilities, looking like skeletons of palaces. When the weather changes, these wide-open vistas of sea and sky, with their stone and metal memories of the past, can have a somewhat terrifying effect. A mass of black cloud rears up behind a sunlit scene; the sea turns a dull, menacing green; an abandoned house groans in the wind. Then, in the next second, the light changes. The water assumes an iridescent color, as if lit from within. Anonymous jewels sparkle in the beach. The sun appears under the ceiling of cloud and floods the world.