A novel set in a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps in the years before the First World War. Hans Castorp, a young engineer from Hamburg, comes to visit his cousin for three weeks, but his stay stretches on as he becomes caught up in the strange, timeless life of the patients. He meets talkative, quarrelsome and fascinating people, including an Italian humanist and a sharp-minded Jesuit-trained rival, who argue over reason, politics, death and progress. Part comic, part philosophical, it is a story of education and of a whole society waiting on the edge of catastrophe. It is one of the great European novels of ideas.