The Magician

By: Colm Tóibín

Narrated by: Gunnar Cauthery

Brought to you by Penguin.

The Sunday Times top 10 best seller

Winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022

From one of our greatest living writers comes a sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family.

The Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction. He would find himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German army, but have a clear vision of the future in the second, anticipating the horrors of Nazism. He would have six children and keep his homosexuality hidden; he was a man forever connected to his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would write some of the greatest works of European literature and win the Nobel Prize, but would never return to the country that inspired his creativity.

Through one life, Colm Toibin tells the breath-taking story of the 20th century.

©2021 Colm Tóibín (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"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...reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer." (Garth Greenwell)

"This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world." (Katharina Volckmer)

Author of interesting and compelling books made into a compelling character

This has been a great audio book. Excellent plot, narrative and excellent reading. Thomas Mann is drawn as an ambiguous, contradictory, humane person that can be liked and disliked depending on one’s attitude to life and others. What makes, can make, one happy or unhappy, actually, or presumably, lucky or unlucky? One of the questions the book made me think about. Thank you