The Magician tells the story of the German writer Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction.
He would find himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German army, but he anticipated the horrors of Nazism in the 1930s. He would have six children and keep his homosexuality hidden; he was forever connected to his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but would never return to the country that inspired his creativity.
‘As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement – immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized’ Richard Ford
‘The Magician is not a biography but a work of art, an emotional reckoning with a century of change, centred on a man who tried to stand upright but was swayed by the winds of that change’ The Times
‘Both epic and intimate, The Magician is most successful in its moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph’ Financial Times
A Peak Experience
If literary critics are to be believed, understanding literature requires an analytical approach. We all know, however, that our experience of a particular book or author is often bound up with where...
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