Doctor Faustus cover art

Doctor Faustus

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Doctor Faustus

By: Thomas Mann
Narrated by: David Rintoul
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £19.99

Buy Now for £19.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius—both national and individual—and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece."—The New Yorker

"Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods."—The New Republic

Public Domain (P)2024 Ukemi Audiobooks Christian Fiction Classics Classics & Allegories Genre Fiction Psychological World Literature

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Buddenbrooks cover art
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man cover art
The Magic Mountain cover art
Joseph and His Brothers: Book 1 cover art
The Man Without Qualities cover art
Goethe cover art
The World of Yesterday cover art
The Glass Bead Game cover art
Beware of Pity cover art
Anti-Oedipus cover art
Our Dollar, Your Problem cover art
On Mysticism cover art
Schopenhauer Collection cover art
The Fyodor Dostoyevsky Complete Collection cover art
Eyeless in Gaza cover art
Psychopolitics cover art

Critic reviews

'Arguably the great German novel'—New York Times
All stars
Most relevant  
After Magic Mountain I longed to return to the pages of Thomas Mann so perfectly rendered by David Rimbault. The main character is sort of ridiculous, the long treatises on music tedious to the uninitiated , the parallel between friend and Fatherland heavy handed - yet it is vintage Mann, beautiful sentences and loads of them , Mitteleuropa ironic restraint, Proustian sketches of pre war intelligentsia types , in such a huge implausible, ambitious oeuvre …. Bravo to the Master

Unstable, flawed, verbose, brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I thought that I'd give Thomas Mann's work a 'go' - I was quite disappointed in the story but David Rintoul's charismatic narration renders the tome, tolerable.

Branching out ....

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.