One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation‘Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing’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 abandons himself in an intoxicating landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow. The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterpiece: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War, and a mysterious meditation on time, art, sickness and death. Translated by John E. Woods