Virtual Event: Colm Tóibín

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes COLM TÓIBÍN—award-winning author of The Master, Brooklyn, and Nora Webster—for a discussion of his latest novel, The Magician.

Ticketing

There are two ticket options available for this event.

Admission Ticket - $33.25: Includes one admission link, one copy of The Magician. US shipping also included. Books will be shipped to ticket-holders following the event. Please note: we are unable to ship internationally.

Pay-What-You-Can Ticket: Includes one admission link. We suggest a $5 donation to support Harvard Book Store's staff and our virtual event series during these difficult times. Thank you for your support!

About The Magician

Colm Tóibín’s magnificent new novel opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.

In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire. The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. This is a man and a family fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed, and unforgettable. As People magazine said about The Master, “It’s a delicate, mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, and Tóibín captures it beautifully.”

Praise for The Magician

"As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement—immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized." —Richard Ford

"This is not just a whole life in a novel, it’s a whole world—with all its wonders, tragedies and sacrifices. I loved every page of this beautiful and immersive journey into The Magician’s mind." —Katharina Volckmer, author of The Appointment

"The tenth novel from the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Master and Brooklyn is an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century’s most intriguing literary figures: Thomas Mann. As he did with Henry James in 2004’s The Master, Tóibín blends the factual with the imagined—following Mann and his complex family through the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and exile—to conjure the rich inner life, and repressed sexuality, of a man 'whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire.'" —LitHub