The Magician by Colm Tóibín

The Magician, written by Colm Tóibín and published by Viking Books (UK) and Scribner (US) in September 2021, is a fictionalised biography of German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955), author of The Magic Mountain and 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. About the book, Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes in The Guardian:

This is an enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced. It is the story of a man who spent almost all of his adult life behind a desk or going for sedate little post-prandial walks with his wife. From this sedentary existence Tóibín has fashioned an epic.

The jacket was designed Chris Bentham, with picture research by Lesley Hodgson. It represents a man starring at St Mark’s Basilica from a gondola, evoking Mann’s novella Death in Venice and his time spent in the city in the summer of 1911. The author’s name and the book title are set in Nizioleti (Abyme, 2017), itself a reflection of Venice’s identity.

The Magician was the laureate of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022.