The Buddenbrooks have worked hard to make their name, and the eponymous firm of Johann Buddenbrook is widely known for its trading prowess. But despite trappings like an imposing town house on Meng Street, under the surface the cracks are showing: Johann’s first son isn’t living up to the status the family desires, and there are more problems to come.

Buddenbrooks is a biographical novel spanning over forty years and four generations, and charts the dwindling fortunes of the Buddenbrooks through their lives in an unnamed north German town, albeit one heavily modeled on Thomas Mann’s hometown of Lübeck. It was Mann’s first novel and was published when he was just twenty-six, following a period of heavy research into the intricacies of the Lübecker bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth-century. The critical reception was exceptionally positive, eventually leading to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann which, unusually, specifically referenced Buddenbrooks as the principal reason for the award.