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 himself falls ill and abandons himself in an intoxicating landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow. The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterpiece: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War, and a mysterious meditation on time, art, sickness and death.

Translated by John E. Woods

The most life-changing novel * Stylist *
Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love -- Jonathan Coe * The Guardian *
All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version…Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor. * New York Times Book Review *
A monumental writer * The Spectator *
[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose. * Washington Post Book World *
[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing. -- A. S. Byatt

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.