'I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?'

Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German family as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, bankruptcy and artistic achievement. Richly realized and profoundly moving, Thomas Mann's first great novel was published when he was only twenty-five, and was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.

John E. Woods's elegant translation is widely acclaimed as the best available English version.