Erudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach lives a life of structured routine. One day, as he puzzles over his stubborn writer's block, Aschenbach has a dazzling vision that leaves him with a restless urge to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural beauty: Tadzio. As he lingers on at the hotel, Aschenbach falls into an ever-deeper infatuation with the youth, whose curled blond hair and porcelain face fill him with rapture. Ignoring whispered warnings of a cholera outbreak in the city, Aschenbach chooses to stay close to Tadzio, his mind swirling with mad desire. Classical in structure yet roiled by disturbing passion, Death in Venice is an enormously powerful story of one man's undoing.

"The greatest German novelist of the 20th century" - Spectator

"A monumental writer" - Sunday Telegraph

"Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic... With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse" - Independent

"Probably the greatest of modern German novelists" - New York Times

"This complex fin-de-siecle masterpiece... seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself" - The Times

"One of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature" - Independent

"A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche" - Financial Times

"Mann's great novella yields more on every reading" - Guardian