Read Buddenbrooks

Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.

An ageing writer, a Polish boy on the Lido and the cholera nobody mentions.

Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.

A Brahmin's son leaves the Buddha to find his own way, and finds it at a river.

Oskar stops growing at three and drums through Danzig's twentieth century; Grass's Nobel.

Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.

The Joads drive from the Dust Bowl to California; Steinbeck's angriest and best.

George and Lennie and the farm they will never have; a hundred pages every school reads.