The Magic Mountain

A visit to a Swiss sanatorium leads to seven years spent outside ordinary time.

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers

Hans Castorp arrives at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But illness, routine and the strange atmosphere of the mountain draw him in.

Life at the Berghof is measured by meals, temperatures, rest cures and conversations. Around Hans gather doctors, patients and intellectual rivals whose ideas about progress, death, desire and civilisation begin to shape his own thinking. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, he falls in love and becomes absorbed by the mountain’s suspended world.

But below the sanatorium, Europe is moving towards the First World War.

The mountain air seems to clarify everything, then clouds it. Time stretches, arguments repeat, snow falls, bodies weaken, and Hans’s stay becomes a slow apprenticeship in the habits, temptations and evasions of a civilisation nearing crisis.

(Cover may vary)

'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian

'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator