The Magic Mountain

By Thomas Mann

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Thomas Mann's 1924 novel follows Hans Castorp, a young German engineer who goes to visit his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps for three weeks and ends up staying seven years, drawn into the patients' strange, timeless world. Through debates between characters such as the humanist Settembrini and the radical Naphta, the novel examines time, illness, love and the intellectual currents of Europe before World War I. Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

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• Patrick Collison: “This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain.”