Buddenbrooks: Thomas Mann

First published in 1901, when Thomas Mann was only twenty-five, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author`s former neighbours in his native Lubeck. As he charts the Buddenbrooks` decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence and madness, Mann ushers the reader into a world of vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip and earthy humour.