The Magic Mountain
  • Published: 8 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837310890
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 752

The Magic Mountain

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 1996
EBook
8 Jan 2026
EBook
3 May 2018
Hardback
15 Jun 2005
Pre-order from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation

It is summer time in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and loses himself in a landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow.

The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterwork: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War and a profound meditation on time, art, sickness and death. John E. Woods’ virtuoso translations of Thomas Mann’s novels are widely recognised as the best versions available in English.
  • Published: 8 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837310890
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 752
Categories:

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 The Magic Mountain

All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version…Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor.

New York Times Book Review

[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose.

Washington Post Book World

[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing.

A. S. Byatt

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Jonathan Coe, The Guardian

The most life-changing novel

Stylist

A monumental writer

The Spectator