Multi-award winning novelist Colm Toibin tackles his second biographical novel in The Magician, about the German novelist Thomas Mann and his eccentric family.

 

After writing The Master, his first biographical novel about Henry James, Toibin turns to another writer with a secret inner life as a homosexual who, like James, also lived in exile from his homeland.

 

The Magician takes us from the strict and formal high bourgeois home of young Thomas Mann in Lubeck to France, Switzerland and America, where Mann observes the Nazi regime from a safe distance.  Meanwhile his flamboyant children pursue their own adventures in a series of much more open and casual sexual encounters - while his all-seeing wife Katia keeps the family together.

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