Thomas Mann

'A story of the voluptuousness of doom' — Thomas Mann Translated and Introduced by David Luke Death in Venice is a story of obsession. Gustave von Aschenbach is a successful but ageing writer who travels to Venice for a holiday. One day, at dinner, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy who is staying with his family in the same...

The Magic Mountain is a European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner, exploring the lure and degeneration of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I. As Seen on BBC Between the Covers The Magic Mountain presents Hans Castorp as 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he visits his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in...

An atmospheric story of obsession and inner conflict set in the oppressive heat of a Venetian summer, Death in Venice is considered to be one of Thomas Mann's greatest works. Death in Venice is part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in cloth with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make...

Erudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach lives a life of structured routine. One day, as he puzzles over his stubborn writer's block, Aschenbach has a dazzling vision that leaves him with a restless urge to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural beauty: Tadzio. As...

This triptych of stories represents some of the finest work by the great German master, Thomas Mann. From a classic early account of artistic formation, suffused with deep melancholy, to works that explore the complex social fractures of his time, this volume showcases the range of Mann's genius and his matchless understanding of character. In sparkling new translations by Lesley...

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Doctor Faustus tells the story of Adrian Leverkühn, a young man destined for success. He is a composer—creative and brilliant—but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with...

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation. It is summertime in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ordinary young man, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and loses himself in a landscape...

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfilment that instead leads to his erotic doom. In the decaying city, besieged by an...

As the ageing Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author who has recently been ennobled in recognition of his literary achievements, arrives in Venice for a holiday and checks into his Lido hotel, he is struck by the arresting good looks of Tadzio, an aristocratic Polish youth of around fourteen who is sojourning there with his family. Gradually, what starts as...

'All his powers were in decline; the only thing growing stronger in him was the conviction that all this could not last much longer, that his demise was imminent.' The Buddenbrooks (1900) was Thomas Mann's first major success. It draws on his own family history and on his vivid memories of growing up in the commercial town of Lübeck in...

The definitive translation of Mann's magnum opus Thomas Mann described Joseph and His Brothers as his 'pyramid'—his greatest literary achievement, although the Nazi regime in his homeland did their best to tear it down on its first publication. A vivid and dazzlingly ambitious epic, it retells the biblical story of Joseph, whose dreams and visions set him apart from his...

The definitive English translation of Mann's first masterpiece—a grand epic of family life. 'I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?' Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles—the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German family as...

Buddenbrooks, Mann's semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic, is the book that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Discover Mann's Nobel Prize-winning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic. The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family—wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks...

'Arguably the great German novel' — New York Times 'This man is mad. Of that there can no longer be any doubt, and it is pitiable that no one representing psychiatric science is part of our circle.' In Germany, May 1943, a middle-aged scholar retires to his study to reflect on the life and untimely death of his friend, a...