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: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, artistic achievement and bankruptcy. Thomas Mann’s first novel is a richly realized, profoundly moving saga of ‘the decline of a family’ as it succumbs to the forces of modernity. Published when he was only twenty-five, it was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.
Translated by John E. Woods

Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century * New York Times *
His masterpiece * Los Angeles Times *
One of the greatest things a novel can do is to create a world - and this is one of the most richly evoked and inhabited of all -- Michael Frayn * Week *
A remarkable achievement…. In Woods’s sparkling translation, the reader encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom, and tone to the original. * The New York Times Book Review *
Wonderfully fresh and elegant…. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe. * Los Angeles Times *

Thomas Mann (Author)
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is widely regarded as the greatest German novelist of the twentieth century. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, was a huge success and led to a Nobel Prize in Literature. However, when the Nazis came to power, his works were blacklisted and burned and Mann was stripped of his citizenship. He spent the latter part of his life in exile in the United States and Switzerland. His other major novels include The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and Joseph and His Brothers.