The definitive translation of 'perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' ( New York Times) '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 dynasty as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, artistic achievement and bankruptcy. Thomas Mann's first novel is a richly realized, profoundly moving saga of 'the decline of a family' as it succumbs to the forces of modernity. Published when he was only twenty-five, it was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Translated by John E. Woods.