1:15 PM – Saturday – Book Club

Germany’s greatest 20th century writer, Thomas Mann, is the subject of Colm Tóibín’s novel.

Gay, artistic Thomas Mann is born into a prosperous mercantile family in Lübeck, a provincial German port on the Baltic Sea. In Thomas’s surroundings, money is as self-evident and essential as water and sunshine. When, a few decades later, the post-war inflation evaporates the family fortune, his mother does what other self- respecting women of her class would do – take to bed and starve herself to death – because she simply doesn’t know how to live otherwise.