Buddenbrooks
  • Published: 8 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837310876
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 864

Buddenbrooks

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 1996
EBook
8 Jan 2026
Hardback
15 Oct 1994
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The definitive English translation of Mann's first masterpiece: a grand epic of family life

‘I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?’

Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German family as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, bankruptcy and artistic achievement. Richly realized and profoundly moving, Thomas Mann’s first great novel was published when he was only twenty-five, and was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.

John E. Woods’s elegant translation is widely acclaimed as the best available English version.
  • Published: 8 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837310876
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 864
Categories:

Also by Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain
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
See all

Praise for Buddenbrooks

His masterpiece

Los Angeles Times

A remarkable achievement…. In Woods’s sparkling translation, the reader encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom, and tone to the original.

The New York Times Book Review

Wonderfully fresh and elegant…. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe.

Los Angeles 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

Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century

New York Times