Buddenbrooks

 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.

Review: Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century * New York 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 best novels of the 20th century * Guardian *

That definitive epic of German family life * Irish Times *

His masterpiece * Los Angeles Times *