At a lavish Buddenbrook christening, the family celebrates the long-awaited birth of a first-born son, an heir who seems to promise renewal even as his frailty casts a shadow over the day. Flowers, food, clergy, and distinguished relatives fill the house, and Pastor Pringsheim presides over a ceremony that is both solemn and socially theatrical, carefully enhanced by the effort to secure Burgomaster Överdieck as godfather. When the baby receives his names and the guests come forward to kis...

Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks opens with the prosperous merchant family gathered in their elegant Lübeck home, where playful catechism, polished manners, and carefully described rooms reveal a world of bourgeois comfort balanced on tradition and status. Tony's spirited answers, the grandfather's old-fashioned authority, the Consul's practical defense of imagination, and the arrival of guests all expose the family's affectionate closeness and the first strains between generations, class expect...

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation‘Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing’It is summer time 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 h...

**The definitive translation of '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 May 1943 a middle-aged scholar retires to his study to reflect on the life and untimely death of his friend, a once-brilliant composer and the flower of German culture. He recalls how, consumed by over-reaching...

The acclaimed, definitive translation of Mann's magnum opus‘Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?’Thomas Mann described Joseph and His Brothers as his ‘pyramid’: his towering literary achievement, although the Nazi regime tried to sabotage its first publication. This lavish, sweeping saga retells the Biblical story of Joseph, whose dreams and visions set him apart from his siblings and lead him first to slavery and ultimat...

**The definitive translation of 'perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' (**New York Times)‘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 dynasty as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: ...

This 2nd volume contains the following 50 works, arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names: Jerome, Jerome K.: Three Men in a Boat Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce, James: Ulysses Kingsley, Charles: The Water-Babies Kipling, Rudyard: Kim La Fayette, Madame de: The Princess of Clèves Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de: Dangerous Liaisons Lawrence, D. H.: Sons and Lovers Lawrence, D. H.: The Rainbow Le Fanu, Sheridan: In a Glass Darkly Lewis, Matthew Gregory: The Mon...

Thomas Mann was the 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. Death in Venice, this tale of forbidden love which has long intrigued the reading public, was his early masterpiece.

“And—and—what comes next?” “Oh, yes, yes, what the dickens does come next? C’est la question, ma très chère demoiselle!” Frau Consul Buddenbrook shot a glance at her husband and came to the rescue of her little daughter. She sat with her mother-in-law on a straight white-enamelled sofa with yellow cushions and a gilded lion’s head at the top. The Consul was in his easy-chair beside her, and the child perched on her grandfather’s knee in the window. “Tony,” prompted the Frau Consul, “‘I bel...

The Buddenbrooks know how to preserve appearances. Their tragedy is that appearances cannot preserve them.Wealthy, esteemed and deeply rooted in tradition, the Buddenbrook family epitomises nineteenth-century German bourgeois values.Set chiefly in Lübeck between the 1830s and the 1870s, Thomas Mann’s family saga follows the Buddenbrooks from civic confidence and commercial success towards gradual dissolution. Across four generations, business decisions, marr...

"The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written."—The GuardianFirst published in 1924, ‘The Magic Mountain’s widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature, written by Thomas Mann, a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.It recounts the story of Hans Castorp, a young orphan who, while visiting his cousin in a sanatorium where she is...

In this masterpiece of intellectual fiction, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann takes you to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that becomes a microcosm for Europe's prewar society.Young Hans Castorp planned a three-week visit to his tubercular cousin, only to find himself mysteriously drawn to the isolated mountain retreat. As his stay stretches from months to years, Hans falls under the influence of the remarkable residents: the humanist Settembrin...