Read The Magic Mountain

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

Four generations of a Lubeck merchant family in decline; Mann's Nobel novel at 26.

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

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

Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.

Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.

Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.

Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.