Try free for 30 days
-
The Magic Mountain
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 37 hrs and 27 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $48.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
-
-
Wonderful!
- By Anonymous User on 12-11-2021
-
The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
-
-
Masterpiece given life
- By Hussain on 25-04-2022
-
The World of Yesterday
- Memoirs of a European
- By: Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell - translator
- Narrated by: David Horovitch
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. It is an unusually humane account of Europe from the closing years of the 19th century through to World War II, seen through the eyes of one of the most famous writers of his era.
-
-
A must read
- By Anonymous User on 15-03-2024
-
Remembrance of Things Past
- Swann's Way
- By: Marcel Proust, Scott Moncrieff - translator
- Narrated by: John Rowe
- Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Swann's Way is Marcel Proust's literary masterpiece and the first part of the multivolume audiobook Remembrance of Things Past. In the opening volume, the narrator travels back in time to recall his childhood and to introduce the listener to Charles Swann, a wealthy friend of the family and celebrity in the Parisian social scene. He again travels back, this time to the youth of Charles Swann in the French town of Combray, to tell the story of the love affair that took place before his own birth.
-
-
My only 5 star package.
- By John on 08-09-2018
-
Never Let Me Go
- 20th anniversary edition
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Kerry Fox
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatizes her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world.
-
Dead Souls
- Penguin Classics
- By: Nikolay Gogol, Robert Maguire
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'dead souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov.
-
-
Classic
- By apple_a_day on 05-08-2023
-
Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
-
-
Wonderful!
- By Anonymous User on 12-11-2021
-
The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
-
-
Masterpiece given life
- By Hussain on 25-04-2022
-
The World of Yesterday
- Memoirs of a European
- By: Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell - translator
- Narrated by: David Horovitch
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. It is an unusually humane account of Europe from the closing years of the 19th century through to World War II, seen through the eyes of one of the most famous writers of his era.
-
-
A must read
- By Anonymous User on 15-03-2024
-
Remembrance of Things Past
- Swann's Way
- By: Marcel Proust, Scott Moncrieff - translator
- Narrated by: John Rowe
- Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Swann's Way is Marcel Proust's literary masterpiece and the first part of the multivolume audiobook Remembrance of Things Past. In the opening volume, the narrator travels back in time to recall his childhood and to introduce the listener to Charles Swann, a wealthy friend of the family and celebrity in the Parisian social scene. He again travels back, this time to the youth of Charles Swann in the French town of Combray, to tell the story of the love affair that took place before his own birth.
-
-
My only 5 star package.
- By John on 08-09-2018
-
Never Let Me Go
- 20th anniversary edition
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Kerry Fox
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatizes her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world.
-
Dead Souls
- Penguin Classics
- By: Nikolay Gogol, Robert Maguire
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'dead souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov.
-
-
Classic
- By apple_a_day on 05-08-2023
-
The Master and Margarita
- By: Mikhail Bulgakov
- Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
- Length: 16 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Devil comes to Moscow, but he isn't all bad; Pontius Pilate sentences a charismatic leader to his death, but yearns for redemption; and a writer tries to destroy his greatest tale, but discovers that manuscripts don't burn. Multi-layered and entrancing, blending sharp satire with glorious fantasy, The Master and Margarita is ceaselessly inventive and profoundly moving. In its imaginative freedom and raising of eternal human concerns, it is one of the world's great novels.
-
-
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Read it!
- By jdk on 25-07-2016
-
The Trial
- Penguin Classics
- By: Franz Kafka, Idris Parry
- Narrated by: Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable.
-
-
Proto-P.K. Dick
- By Wildschwein on 20-10-2023
-
The Golden Bough
- A Study in Magic and Religion
- By: Sir James George Frazer
- Narrated by: Andrew Cullum
- Length: 44 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Golden Bough, the monumental study of religious rites and practices in ‘primitive’ societies, was one of the earliest influential texts in anthropology. Its author, Sir James Frazer, surveyed the wide range of cultural habits, taboos and beliefs in communities across the world concluding that there was an observable pattern in the way magic developed into religion, though formal expression emerged in different ways.
-
A Prayer for Owen Meany
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 27 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Of all of John Irving's books, this is the one that lends itself best to audio. In print, Owen Meany's dialogue is set in capital letters; for this production, Irving himself selected Joe Barrett to deliver Meany's difficult voice as intended. In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys – best friends – are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary and terrifying.
-
-
Out-standing novel!
- By Wendy on 18-03-2016
-
The Sound and the Fury
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
-
-
Phenomenal
- By Anonymous User on 29-06-2021
-
Life and Fate: The Complete Series (Dramatised)
- By: Vasily Grossman
- Narrated by: Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad. This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years.
-
-
A Truly Magnificent Story Presented Dramatically.
- By helen d. on 23-10-2021
-
Steppenwolf
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Peter Weller
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine.
-
-
It's bigbrain time
- By Anonymous User on 15-01-2021
-
The Possessed
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Garnett - translator
- Narrated by: Constantine Gregory
- Length: 27 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them. It follows the career of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, a political terrorist who leads a group of nihilists on a demonic quest for societal breakdown. They are consumed by their desires and ideals, and have surrendered themselves fully to the darkness of their "demons". This possession leads them to engulf a quiet provincial town and subject it to a storm of violence.
-
-
Takes a while to get into but worth it
- By Anonymous User on 18-08-2022
-
Absalom, Absalom!
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson township in the early 1830s. With a French architect and a band of wild Haitians, he wrung a fabulous plantation out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. Sutpen was a man, Faulker said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him". His tragedy left its impress not only on his contemporaries but also on men who came after, men like Quentin Compson, haunted even into the 20th century by Sutpen's legacy.
-
The Castle
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A land-surveyor, known only as K., arrives at a small village permanently covered in snow and dominated by a castle to which access seems permanently denied. K.'s attempts to discover why he has been called constantly run up against the peasant villagers, who are in thrall to the absurd bureaucracy that keeps the castle shut, and the rigid hierarchy of power among the self-serving bureaucrats themselves.
-
-
Labyrinthine
- By Jordan61 on 18-03-2024
-
Little Dorrit
- The Audible Dickens Collection
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 40 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This Audible Exclusive production revisits Charles Dickens’ tragi-comic novel Little Dorrit. Written during the Crimean War, it a story of fortunes won and lost and a masterly portrayal of the failings of Victorian Society, with the ever-present spectre of law enforcement and imprisonment looming over a fearful population. Divided into two parts, Book One: Poverty and Book Two: Riches, Little Dorrit satirises the debtors prisons and the detrimental effect of enforcing a British class system.
-
-
Wow!
- By Stephen Grocott on 05-04-2024
-
Crime and Punishment
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Narrated by: Constantine Gregory
- Length: 22 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty-stricken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems with one simple but horrifying act: the murder of a pawnbroker. She is, he feels, just a parasite on society. But does the end justify the means? Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov makes his decision and then has to live with it.
-
-
One of the greatest literary feats
- By Georgeorges on 28-07-2020
Publisher's Summary
It was The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) that confirmed Thomas Mann as a Nobel prizewinner for literature and rightly so, for it is undoubtedly one of the great novels of the 20th century.
Its unusual story - it opens with a young man visiting a friend in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - was originally started by Mann in 1912 but was not completed until 1924. Then, it was instantly recognised as a masterpiece and led to Mann’s Nobel Prize in 1929.
Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912, and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure, and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, some of whom have been there for years, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.
Among them are Hofrat Behrens, the principal doctor, the curiously attractive Clavdia Chauchat and two intellectuals: Ludovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta with their strongly contrasted personalities and differing political, ethical, artistic and spiritual ideals. Hans Castorp’s stay is extended, once, twice and still further, as he appears to develop symptoms which suggest that his health, once so robust, would benefit from the treatments and the mountain air.
As time passes, it becomes clear that the young man, with a particular interest in shipbuilding and not much else, finds his outlook and knowledge broadened by his mountain companions, his intellect stretched and his emotional experience deepened and enriched. Hans Castorp is changing, day by day, month by month, year by year, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes with a sudden advance, as he encounters the varied range of sparkling characters, their comedies and tragedies, their aspirations and their defeats.
The Magic Mountain is a classic bildungsroman, an educational journey of growth - a genre that began with an earlier novel in the German tradition: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. It is presented here in the acclaimed modern translation by John E. Woods and is told by David Rintoul with his particular understanding for Thomas Mann as displayed in his widely praised Ukemi recording of Buddenbrooks.
More from the same
What listeners say about The Magic Mountain
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Pete Shields
- 15-11-2020
A mountain of world history
The individual and how he or she manages to work with society. Mann's prose and womderful characters. History came alive.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jessica
- 27-10-2023
Amazing
I loved every minute of this, apart from the very extensive lessons on biology. But every other minute.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Juy Hepner
- 15-02-2021
Gentle German
The intellectual journey of Hans is unique. There is a chapter on anatomy which is very sensual. The romantic night when he declares his love is uplifting. The stoic resolve while he waits for her is frustratingly German. The pedagogical friendship with Setembrini stand alone in its exposition of the eloquence of that character. The romantic thread was not tied properly. The ending seems a little hurried, given the detail used all the way through. It is obvious that the Great War broke the author’s spirit. It would have been better to have explored the love story with Klavdia more. Oh yes there was also a very touching scene when Hans opens up to Klavdia’s lover...but then he can’t be his friend. Jane’s virtue lies only in the negative power to refrain from taking chances and his passivity becomes quietism. He has no reason to live. His passion is repressed. The resurrection of his cousin at the seance is nicely mysterious. It is as though he betrayed god or something because after that it seems that the happy spell on the Magic Mountain is broken and suddenly everyone turns on each other and in a short period a nasty anti-Semite turns up, litigation is rife and then two old friends fight a dual.
Then of course he’s off to the front!
The narrator is outstanding.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Robyn
- 06-06-2020
Still relevant, still powerful.
An excellent reading . A thwarted coming of age of physically pampered intellectually indulgent parts of Europe. a coming of age that was a coming to war. The disgrace of it resonates.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!