The Magician by Colm To´ ib´ın (Pan Macmillan Australia, $38)

Irish novelist Colm To´ ibı´n has written an incisive and witty novel that shows what good company German writer Thomas Mann and his family might have been. To´ ibı´n did this sort of thing once before in his novel The Master, shadowing a great writer – Henry James, in that case – as he works and plays. What James and Mann have in common besides the demands they make on readers is a fraught relationship with their homosexuality. James was afraid to give his inclinations free rein – or, indeed, any rein at all. To´ ibı´n’s Mann is less repressed. Nonetheless, Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929, marries the attractive and intelligent Katia Pringsheim, with whom he will have six children. To´ ibı´n seems determined to give the children their due, something their father never managed to do. Wherever the Manns live – in Munich, Princeton, Los Angeles or Switzerland – they receive glittering guests, among them Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Gustav, who says whatever she pleases. Another riveting presence is Agnes Meyer, wife of Eugene Meyer, who published The Washington Post during the 1930s and 40s. At 500-plus pages, The Magician is Mann-sized, but it canters along not only on the strength of To´ ibı´n’s graceful prose, but also because the reader can hardly wait for the next bon mot from a family member or guest.