A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting...

A German teenager has an affair with an emotionally remote older woman and only years later, when he is a law student and she is on trial, does he discover that she is a survivor of the Holocaust.

"Munich, 1938. Evelyn Brand is an American foreign correspondent as determined to prove her worth in a male-dominated profession as she is to expose the growing tyranny in Nazi Germany. To do so, she must walk a thin line. If she offends the government, she could be expelled from the country - or worse. If she fails to truthfully report on major stories, she'll never be able to give a voice to the oppressed - and wake up the folks back home. In another...

Sartor Resartus was a strange and new book when it was first published in 1833, and in many ways it remains a strange and new book today. The bulk of the novel takes the form of the a commentary on the life and works of the fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a sort of renaissance-man German philosopher who develops a “Philosophy of Clothes.” The commentary is composed by a fictional English commentator, known only as the “Editor”;

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Schoolboy Michael Berg, 15, meets an older woman and they have an affair, which she breaks off and disappears. Seven years later Berg, now a law student attending a trial, sees her in the dock, accused in a crime dating back to World War II and the death camp at Auschwitz. By a German writer

American John Dowell tries to understand the complex intrigues and passions behind the orderly Edwardian facade of the relationship he and his wife nurtured with English couple Captain and Leonora Ashburnham.

A family story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family centers on Helene, a woman who must make the most of a tumultuous time, in a book that reveals the scope of German citizens' denial--or "blindness of the heart"--as a survival mechanism during World War II.

Directed by MI6 to Berlin in 1963 to negotiate a delicate prisoner exchange on either side of the wall, Joe Wilderness covertly plans to use the operation to make a little something extra on the side, with unexpected results.

A collection of nine stories features a coolly intelligent protagonist who makes compassionate observations about such characters as an abused small-town doctor, a pair of privileged but neglected siblings, and the card-playing youngest member of a family of petty criminals