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Buddenbrooks
  • Published: 1 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780749386474
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 864
  • RRP: $29.99

Buddenbrooks

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 1996
EBook
8 Jan 2026
Hardback
15 Oct 1994
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Mann's semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic. The book that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature

Discover Mann's Nobel Prizewinning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic.

The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success.

In this, Mann's first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty.

'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times
  • Published: 1 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780749386474
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 864
  • RRP: $29.99
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Also by Thomas Mann

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
Confessions Of Felix Krull
Lotte In Weimar
Joseph and his Brothers
Collected Stories (Mann)
Little Herr Friedmann And Other Stories
Death In Venice
See all

Praise for Buddenbrooks

An absorbing, well-observed, almost film-like telling of a family in Lubeck over a generation or two

Independent

Has extraordinary value as a document over and above its importance as literature. The friendly dispassionateness of the book, the amplitude, the final perfection of clearness, make it as satisfying as a Dürer drawing

Observer

Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century

New York Times

A detailed portrait of a family and its destructive impact

New York Times

One of the best novels of the 20th century

Guardian

That definitive epic of German family life

Irish Times

His masterpiece

Los Angeles Times

A simple but magnificent proof of genius. A first novel by a 25-year-old with absolute command of his craft, uncanny knowledge of his world, its past and present, and a daring originality which makes its last pages among the most startlingly moving I know

Alan Hollinghurst, New York 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