The Magician

A celebration of what novels can do

Observer on ‘House of Names’

Devastatingly human . . . savage, sordid and hauntingly believable

Guardian on 'House of Names'

Tremendous, richly beautiful, wonderful . . . it does everything we ought to ask of a great novel

Tessa Hadley, Guardian, on ‘Nora Webster’

Subtle and enthralling

Sunday Times, on ‘Nora Webster’

This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world - with all its wonders, tragedies and sacrifices. I loved every page of this beautiful and immersive journey into The Magician's mind

Katharina Volckmer, author of The Appointment

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

No living novelist dramatizes artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín, or conveys so well the entanglement of imagination and desire . . . Reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer

Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

The personal and public history is compelling . . . an intriguing view of a writer who well deserves another turn on the literary stage

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

This graceful novel is a moving and intimate portrait by one master of another . . . It is a stunning tribute to the great man, and a vital story for now

Anna Funder

The Magician is a remarkable achievement. Mann himself, one feels certain, would approve

John Banville

This vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself

Publishing News

Toibin's symphonic and moving novel humanizes [Mann] . . . Maximalist in scope but intimate in feeling

New York Times

Mr. Tóibín wields a dramatically stripped-down prose style . . . epiphanies, when they come, are all the more powerful after so much restraint . . . What Mr. Tóibín's exquisitely sensitive novel gets right, in a way that biography rarely does, is its acknowledgement of unknowability

Wall Street Journal

A haunting and heartrendingly intimate portrait of its protagonist, the German writer Thomas Mann, and a richly drawn sense of place . . . [a] vast and stunningly realized world . . . you'll find yourself savouring every page

Vogue, a Most Anticipated Book of Fall

Extensively researched and lyrically wrought . . . a complex but empathetic portrayal of a writer in a lifelong battle against his innermost desires, his family and the tumultuous times they endure

Time, Best Books of Fall 2021

Compelling . . . Tóibín succeeds in conveying his fascination with the Magician, as his children called him, who could make sexual secrets vanish beneath a rich surface life of family and uncommon art . . . intriguing

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Employing luxurious prose that quietly evokes the tortured soul behind these literary masterpieces, Tóibín has an unequalled gift for mapping the interior of genius

Booklist, starred review

[The Magician] vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself

Publishers Weekly, starred review

A masterpiece, vast and luminous . . . witty and profound and truthful

Tessa Hadley

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

This is an enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced. It is the story of a man who spent almost all of his adult life behind a desk or going for sedate little post-prandial walks with his wife. From this sedentary existence Tóibín has fashioned an epic

Guardian

Colm Tóibín has already written several truly extraordinary novels. The Magician may be the very best of them

Sunday Independent

A triumph

Daily Telegraph

Wonderful . . . a very accomplished and enjoyable novel

Scotsman

In a novel of many moods, its every page rings true

Mail on Sunday

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

Compelling . . . Superb characterisation and sharp insights throughout make this an immensely enjoyable novel

Daily Mirror

It's a work of huge imaginative sympathy . . . quite thrilling . . . it takes a writer of Tóibín's calibre to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be transmogrified, turned into art

New York Times Book Review

An incisive and witty novel that shows what good company the Nobelist and his family might have been

Washington Post

The Magician, Colm Tóibín's new novel about Mann, resists the shallow gestures of Hollywood biopics, reaching for something mainstream film couldn't get at, or wouldn't bother with. How does an artist create, and can a true artist live as the rest of us do?

Rumaan Alam, Vulture

Literary lovers will want to sink into this absorbing reimagining of the life of the Nobel Prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann . . . Mann family members have their own struggles - with each other and a world where they rarely feel at home - all vividly brought to life

AARP

This meticulously woven novel re-creates the life of Thomas Mann . . . An ode to a 20th-century genius and a feat of literary sorcery in its own right

Oprah Magazine

You don't have to be a Thomas Mann fan to be gripped by the account of his life that author Colm Tóibín delivers in his new novel . . . [Tóibín's] his biggest triumph is in getting to the heart of Mann's dilemma

Seattle Times

The hallmarks of Tóibín's diaphanous prose - stillness, precision, intimacy- remain intact despite the wideranging, voluminous material of Mann's biography . . . in a quietly epic tale, Tóibín expertly captures the layers of a richly multiple self and surely reasserts his own status as one of our greatest living novelists

i

An expansive yet deeply personal exploration of the life of exiled German writer Thomas Mann . . . Containing beautiful observations on life and literature, and a sweeping sense of historical scale, The Magician remains tightly written and wryly funny

Independent

Simultaneously intimate and transnational . . . this is deeply engaging, serious and beautiful writing that carries its echoing questions with grace

Irish Times

I love everything Colm Tóibín has written and The Magician is another masterpiece . . . Historical fiction at its best

Nicola Sturgeon, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Magician uses the life of Thomas Mann to explore the complex relationships between intimacy and history, public and private lives, and the slippery nature of creativity itself. I found it mesmerising

Fintan O’Toole, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Magician, recreates as biographical fiction the life, thoughts and achievements of Thomas Mann. It is dark, beautifully constructed and, I think, as near as one author can get to entering the mind of another

Melvyn Bragg, New Statesman, Books of the Year

A sweeping overview of Thomas Mann's life

Justine Jordan, Guardian, Best Fiction of 2021

Taking on Thomas Mann is no easy task, but Tóibín's fictional account of the inner life of the great German novelist is masterful

Frederick Studemann, FT, Best Books of 2021: Critics’ Picks

Intelligent and enthralling

Scotsman

The Irish novelist famed for Brooklyn imagines the world of the German Nobel-winning writer Thomas Mann and his secret desire for handsome young men, in what the Times reviewer John Self says is his best novel yet

The Times, Best Books of 2021

Sumptuous and satisfying

The Times, A Best Fiction Book of 2021