John Woods

"The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World...

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs...

Mann's rendering of the classic Faust legend explores the goals, values, and conflicts of modern man.

From 1942 to 1944, twelve thousand children passed through the Theresienstadt internment camp on their way to Auschwitz. Only a few hundred of them survived the war. In the mid-1990s, German journalist Hannelore Brenner met ten of these child survivors--women in their late seventies today. Weaving these interviews with excerpts from diaries that were kept secretly during the war and samples of the art, music, and poetry created at Theresienstadt,...