Buddenbrooks

“A very great book… of an incomparable depth, insight, creative fullness, structural perfection.” – The Nation

Thomas Mann’s first major novel is the story of four generations of the Buddenbrooks, a wealthy family in northern Germany: Johann, the patriarch, a member of the local merchant nobility; the Consul, who maintains the appearance of the family’s prosperity; Thomas and Christian, who preside over the collapse of the family firm; and Hanno, the weak, dreamy, ineffectual artist, who symbolizes the family’s extinction through overrefinement. With its brilliant accretion of the domestic details of middle-class life – births and christenings, marriages, divorces, and deaths – Buddenbrooks masterfully captures the richness and complexity of human experience.

Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter.

Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.