<p><b>As Seen on BBC Between the Covers</b><br><br><b>This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneration of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of the First World War.</b><br><br>Hans Castorp is ''a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man'' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.<br><br><b>''Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love'' Jonathan Coe, <i>Guardian</i></b><br><br><b>''The greatest German novelist of the 20th century'' <i>Spectator</i></b></p>