Thomas Mann

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The Magic Mountain

Buddenbrooks

Doctor Faustus

Joseph and his Brothers

Death in Venice And Other Stories

Confessions Of Felix Krull

Lotte In Weimar

& other stories

Mario and the Magician

Death In Venice

Joseph and His Brothers

Collected Stories

Little Herr Friedmann And Other Stories

Royal Highness

The Decline of a Family

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Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century

Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse.

A life-altering book would be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It's really thick and German. I like its sensibility, which is unashamedly intellectual.

A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing

Comparisons arise with The Waste Land, published two years earlier and also concerned to exhibit the futility of a way of life which had led to the horrors of the First World War. But while T. S. Eliot's poem is a pared-down epic of resonances and allusions, Mann's novel is a full-blown exploration, playing seemingly endless variations on the theme

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers 
 
A brief visit to a Swiss sanatorium becomes a life-altering seven-year odyssey. 
 
Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But when he falls ill, he remains and is drawn in by the introspection and erudition that define life in the mountains. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War. 
 
'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian 
 
'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers 
 
A brief visit to a Swiss sanatorium becomes a life-altering seven-year odyssey. 
 
Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But when he falls ill, he remains and is drawn in by the introspection and erudition that define life in the mountains. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War. 
 
'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian 
 
'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator 
 
 
 
(Cover may vary)

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards he left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he recieved in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

The Magic Mountain

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Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon

A monumental writer

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century

A life-altering book would be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It's really thick and German. I like its sensibility, which is unashamedly intellectual.

A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing

The most life-changing novel

About Thomas Mann

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