This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event. Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts – The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt and Joseph the Provider – as a unified narrative, a ‘mythological novel’ of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann evokes for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humour, emotion, psychological insight and epic grandeur. Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and his Brothers that is worthy of Mann’s achievement, revealing the novel’s exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse and sublime.